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THE 



MODERN 



BKITISH ESSAYISTS, 



VOL. II. 



ARCHIBALD ALISON. 



PHILADELPHIA: 
CAREY AND HART 
1847. 



o- 










MISCELLANEOUS 



ESSAYS. 



BY 



ARCHIBALD ALISON, F. E. S. 

AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OF EUROPE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION." 



Hrprintrt* from tl)c (Sfngltel) ©riginals, 



WITH THE AUTHOR'S CORRECTIONS FOR THIS EDITION. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

CAREY & HART, 126 CHESNUT STREET. 

1847. 



#1 






o 
r 



or 



PREFACE. 



A wish having been expressed by the publishers of this work to have a 
collection of my Miscellaneous Essays, published at different times and in different 
periodical works in Great Britain, made for reprints in America, and selected 
and arranged by myself, I have willingly assented to so flattering a proposal. 
I have endeavoured in making the selection to choose such as discuss subjects 
possessing, as far as possible, a general and durable interest; and to admi* 
those only, relating to matters of social contest or national policy in Great 
Britain, which are likely, from [the importance of the questions involved in 
them, to excite some interest as contemporary compositions among future 
generations of men. And I should be ungrateful if, in making my first appear- 
ance before the American public, and in a work hitherto published in a col- 
lected form only in this country, I did not make my warmest acknowledgments 
for the liberal spirit in which they have received my writings, and the indul- 
gence they have manifested towards their imperfections; and express at the 
same time the pride which I feel, as an English author, at the vast and 
boundless field for British literary exertion which is afforded by the extension 
of the Anglo-Saxon race on the other side of the Atlantic. If there is any 
wish I entertain more cordially than another, it is that this strong though unseen 
mental bond may unite the British family in 'every part of the world, and 
cause them all to feel as brothers, even when the time arrives, as arrive it will, 
that they have obtained the dominion of half the globe. 

A. ALISON 

Possel House, Glasgow, 
Sept. 1, 1844. 



CONTENTS. 



CHATEAUBRIAND 

NAPOLEON . 

BOSSUET . 

POLAND 

MADAME DE STAEL . 

NATIONAL MONUMENTS . 

MARSHAL NEY . 

ROBERT BRUCE 

PARIS IN 1814 . 

THE LOUVRE IN 1814 . 

TYROL . 

FRANCE IN 1833 . 

ITALY 



THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION 
MICHELET'S FRANCE 



Page 
7 



27 

42 

52 

64 

73 

" . .84 

94 

100 

109 

117 

125 

154 

SCOTT, CAMPBELL, AND BYRON 160 

173 

184 

MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS .... . 195 

ARNOLD'S ROME yg* 

MIRABEAU ••..... 212 

BULWER'S ATHENS g— 

THE REIGN OF TERROR .... o.., 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830 253 

THE FALL OF TURKEY 366 

THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820 279 

PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS 289 

KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA 

EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830 .... 309 

DESERTION OF PORTUGAL og, 

CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN 325 

WELLINGTON ^ 

THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION 343 

THE FUTURE «- 

GUIZOT 3ffJ 

HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO 380 

A2 5* 



ALISON'S ESSAYS. 



CHATEAUBBIAND. 

[Blackwood's Magazine, March, 1832.] 



It is one of the worst effects of the vehe- 
mence of faction, which has recently agitated 
the nation, that it tends to withdraw the atten- 
tion altogether from works of permanent lite- 
rary merit, and by presenting nothing to the 
mind but a constant succession of party dis- 
cussions, both to disqualify it for enjoying the 
sober pleasure of rational information, and 
render the great works which are calculated 
to delight and improve the species known only 
to a limited class of readers. The conceit and 
prejudice of a large portion of the public, in- 
crease just in proportion to the diminution of 
their real information. By incessantly studying 
journals where the advantage of the spread 
of knowledge is sedulously inculcated, they 
imagine that they have attained that know- 
ledge, because they have read these journals, 
and by constantly abusing those whom they 
stigmatize as offering the light of truth, they 
come to forget that none oppose it so effectually 
as those who substitute for its steady ray the 
lurid flame of democratic flattery. 

It is, therefore, with sincere and heartfelt joy, 
that we turn from the turbid and impassioned 
stream of political discussion, to the pure foun- 
tains of literary genius ; from the vehemence 
of party strife to the calmness of philosophic 
investigation ; from works of ephemeral cele- 
brity to the productions of immortal genius. 
"When we consider the vast number of these 
which have issued from the European press 
during the last fifteen years, and the small 
extent to which they are as yet known to the 
British public, we are struck with astonish- 
ment ; and confirmed in the opinion, that those 
who are loudest in praise of the spread of in- 
formation, are not unfrequently those who 
possess least of it for any useful purpose. 

It has long been a settled opinion in France, 
that the seams of English literature are wrought 
out ; that while we imagine we are advancing, 
we are in fact only moving round in a circle, 
and that it is in vain to expect any thing new 
on human affairs from a writer under the 
English constitution. This they ascribe to the 
want of the bouleversemcnt of ideas, and the ex- 
trication of original thought, which a revolu- 
tion produces ; and they coolly calculate on the 
catastrophe which is to overturn the English 
government, as likely to open new veins of 
thought among its inhabitants, and pour new 
streams of eloquence into its writers. 



Without acquiescing in the justice of this 
observation in all its parts, and strenuously 
asserting for the age of Scott and Byron a 
decided superiority over any other in British 
history since the days of Shakspeare and Mil- 
ton, at least in poetry and romance, we must 
admit that the observation, in many depart- 
ments of literature, is but too well founded. 
No one will accuse us of undue partiality for 
the French Revolution, a convulsion whose 
principles we have so long and so vigorously 
opposed, and whose horrors we have en- 
deavoured, sedulously, though inadequately, to 
impress upon our readers. It is therefore 
with a firm conviction of impartiality, and a 
consciousness of yielding only to the tone of 
truth, that we are obliged to confess, that 
in historical and political compositions the 
French of our age are greatly superior to the 
writers of this country. We are not insensible 
to the merits of our modern English historians. 
We fully appreciate the learned research of 
Turner, the acute and valuable narrative of 
Lingard, the elegant language and antiquarian 
industry of Tytler, the vigour and originality 
of M'Crie, and the philosophic wisdom of 
Mackintosh. But still we feel the justice of the 
French observation, that there is something 
" English" in all their ideas. Their thoughts 
seem formed on the even tenor of political 
events prior to 1789: and in reading their 
works we can hardly persuade ourselves that 
they have been ushered into the world since 
the French Revolution advanced a thousand 
years the materials of political investigation. 

Chateaubriand is universally allowed by 
the French, of all parties, to be their first writer. 
His merits, however, are but little understood 
in this country. He is known as once a minis- 
ter of Louis XVIII., and ambassador of that 
monarch in London, as the writer of many 
celebrated political pamphlets, and the victim, 
since the Revolution of 1830, tf his noble and 
ill-requited devotion to that unfortunate family. 
Few are aware that he is, without one single 
exception, the most eloquent writer of the pre- 
sent age ; that independent of politics, he has 
produced many works on morals, religion, and 
history, destined for lasting endurance; that 
his writings combine the strongest love of 
rational freedom, with the warmest inspiration 
of Christian devotion ; that he is, as it were, 
the link between the feudal and the revolu- 



8 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



tionary ages; retaining from the former its 
generous and elevated feeling, and inhaling 
from the latter its acute and fearless investi- 
gation. The last pilgrim, with devout feelings, 
to the holy sepulchre, he was the first supporter 
of constitutional freedom in France ; discard- 
ing thus from former times their bigoted fury, 
and from modern, their infidel spirit ; blending 
all that was noble in the ardour of the Crusades, 
with all that is generous in the enthusiasm of 
freedom. 

It is the glory of the Conservative Party 
throughout the world, and by this party we 
mean all who are desirous in every country to 
uphold the religion, the institutions, and the 
liberties of their fathers, that the two greatest 
writers of the age have devoted their talents 
to the support of their principles. Sir Walter 
Scott and Chateaubriand are beyond all ques- 
tion, and by the consent of both nations, 
at the head of the literature of France and 
England since the Revolution; and they will 
both leave names at which the latest posterity 
will feel proud, when the multitudes who have 
sought to rival them on the revolutionary side 
are buried in the waves of forgotten time. It 
is no small triumph to the cause of order in 
these trying days, that these mighty spirits, 
destined to instruct and bless mankind through 
every succeeding age, should have proved so 
true to the principles of virtue ; and the patriot 
may well rejoice that generations yet unborn, 
while they approach their immortal shrines, 
or share in the enjoyments derived from the 
legacies they have bequeathed to mankind, 
will inhale only a holy spirit, and derive from 
the pleasures of imagination nothing but ad- 
ditional inducements to the performance of 
duty. 

Both these great men are now under an 
eclipse, too likely, in one at least, to terminate 
in earthly extinction. The first lies on the 
bed, if not of material, at least, it is to be 
feared, of intellectual death ; and the second, 
arrested by the military despotism which he 
so long strove to avert from his country, has 
lately awaited in the solitude of a prison the fate 
destined for him by revolutionary violence.* 
But 

" Stone walls do not a prison make, 

Nor iron bars a cage ; 
Minds innocent and quiet take 

That for an hermitage." 

It is in such moments of gloom and depres- 
sion, when the fortune of the world seems most 
adverse, when the ties of mortality are about 
to be dissolved, or the career of virtue is on 
the point of being terminated, that the immortal 
superiority of genius and virtue most strongly 
appear. In vain was the Scottish bard ex- 
tended on the bed of sickness, or the French 
patriot confined to the gloom of a dungeon ; 
their works remain to perpetuate their lasting 
sway over the minds of men ; and while their 
mortal frames are sinking beneath the suffer- 
ings of the world, their immortal souls rise into 
the region of spirits, to witness a triumph 
more glorious, an ascendency more enduring, 

' * Sir Walter Scott, at this period, was on his deathbed, 
and Chateaubriand imprisoned by order of Louis Philippe. 



than ever attended the arms of Caesar or Alex- 
ander. 

Though pursuing the same pure and en- 
nobling career ; though gifted with the same 
ardent imagination, and steeped in the same 
fountains of ancient lore, no two writers were 
ever more different than Chateaubriand and 
Sir Walter Scott. The great characteristic of 
the French author, is the impassioned and 
enthusiastic turn of his mind. Master of im- 
mense information, thoroughly imbued at once 
with the learning of classical and catholic 
times ; gifted with a retentive memory, a poeti- 
cal fancy, and a painter's eye, he brings to bear 
upon every subject the force of erudition, the 
images of poetry, the charm of varied scenery, 
and the eloquence of impassioned feeling. 
Hence his writings display a reach and variety 
of imagery, a depth of light and shadow, a 
vigour of thought, and an extent of illustration, 
to which there is nothing comparable in any 
other writer, ancient or modern, with whom 
we are acquainted. All that he has seen, or 
read, or heard, seem present to his mind, what- 
ever he does, or wherever he is. He illustrates 
the genius of Christianity by the beauties of 
classical learning, inhales the spirit of ancient 
prophecy on the shores of the Jordan, dreams 
on the banks of the Eurotas of the solitude 
and gloom of the American forests; visits the 
Holy Sepulchre with a mind alternately de- 
voted to the devotion of a pilgrim, the curiosity 
of an antiquary, and the enthusiasm of a crusa- 
der, and combines, in his romances, with the 
tender feelings of chivalrous love, the heroism 
of Roman virtue, and the sublimity of Chris- 
tian martyrdom. His waitings are less a 
faithful portrait of any particular age or coun- 
try, than an assemblage of all that is grand, 
and generous, and elevated in human nature. 
He drinks deep of inspiration at all the foun- 
tains where it has ever been poured forth to 
mankind, and delights us less by the accuracy 
of any particular picture, than the traits of 
genius which he has combined from every 
quarter where its footsteps have trod. His 
style seems formed on the lofty strains of 
Isaiah, or the beautiful images of the Book of 
Job, more than all the classical or modern 
literature with which his mind is so amply 
stored. He is admitted by all Frenchmen, of 
whatever party, to be the most perfect living 
master of their language, and to have gained 
for it beauties unknown to the age of Bossuet 
and Fenelon. Less polished in his periods, 
less sonorous in his diction, less melodious in 
his rhythm, than these illustrious writers, he 
is incomparably more varied, rapid, and en- 
ergetic; his ideas flow in quicker succession, 
his words follow in more striking antithesis ; 
the past, the present, and the future rise up at 
once before us; and we see how strongly the 
stream of genius, instead of gliding down the 
smooth current of ordinary life, has been broken 
and agitated by the cataract of revolution. 

With far less classical learning, fewer 
images derived from travelling, inferior in- 
formation on many historical subjects, and a 
mind of a less impassioned and energetic cast, 
our own Sir Walter is far more deeply read in 
that book which is ever the same — the human 



CHATEAUBRIAND. 



heart. This is his unequalled excellence — 
there he stands, since the days of Shakspeare, 
without a rival. It is to this cause that his 
astonishing success has been owing. We feel 
in his characters that it is not romance, but 
real life which is represented. Every word 
that is said, especially in the Scotch novels, 
is nature itself. Homer, Cervantes, Shakspeare, 
and Scott, alone have penetrated to the deep 
substratum of character, which, however dis- 
guised by the varieties of climate and govern- 
ment, is at bottom everywhere the same; and 
thence they have found a responsive echo in 
every human heart. Every man who reads 
these admirable works, from the North Cape 
to Cape Horn, feels that what the characters 
they contain are made to say, is just what 
would have occurred to themselves, or what 
they have heard said by others as long as they 
lived. Nor is it only in the delineation of 
character, and the knowledge of human nature, 
that the Scottish Novelist, like his great pre- 
decessors, is but for them without a rival. 
Powerful in the pathetic, admirable in dialogue, 
unmatched in description, his writings capti- 
vate the mind as much by the varied excel- 
lencies which they exhibit, as the powerful 
interest which they maintain. He has carried 
romance out of the region of imagination and 
sensibility into the walks of actual life. We 
feel interested in his characters, not because 
they are ideal beings with whom we have be- 
come acquainted for the first time when we 
began the book, but because they are the very 
persons we have lived with from our infancy. 
His descriptions of scenery are not luxuriant 
and glowing pictures of imaginary beauty, like 
those of Mrs. Radcliffe, having no resemblance 
to actual nature, but faithful and graphic por- 
traits of real scenes, drawn with the eye of a 
poet, but the fidelity of a consummate draughts- 
man. He has combined historical accuracy 
and romantic adventure with the interest of 
tragic events ; we live with the heroes, and 
princes, and paladins of former times, as with 
our own contemporaries; and acquire from 
the splendid colouring of his pencil such a 
vivid conception of the manners and pomp of 
the feudal ages, that we confound them, in our 
recollections, with the scenes which we our- 
selves have witnessed. The splendour of 
their tournaments, the magnificence of their 
dress, the glancing of their arms ; their haughty 
manners, daring courage, and knightly cour- 
tesy; the shock of their battlesteeds, the splin- 
tering of their lances, the conflagration of their 
castles, are brought before our eyes in such 
vivid colours, that we are at once transported 
to the age of Richard and Saladin, of Bruce 
and Marmion, of Charles the Bold and Philip 
Augustus. Disdaining to flatter the passions, 
or pander to the ambition of the populace, he 
has done more than any man alive to elevate 
their character ; to fill their minds with the 
noble sentiments which dignify alike the cot- 
tage and the palace ; to exhibit the triumph 
of virtue in the humblest stations over all that 
the world calls great; and without ever in- 
dulging a sentiment which might turn them 
from the scenes of their real usefulness, bring 
home to every mind the "might that slumbers 



in a peasant's arm." Above all, he has uni- 
formly, in all his varied and extensive produc- 
tions, shown himself true to the cause of virtue. 
Amidst all the innumerable combinations of 
character, event, and dialogue, which he has 
formed, he has ever proved faithful to the polar 
star of duty; and alone, perhaps, of the great 
romance-writers of the world, has not left a 
line which on his death-bed he would wish 
recalled. 

Of such men France and England may well 
be proud; shining, as they already do, through 
the clouds and the passions of a fleeting ex- 
istence, they are destined soon to illuminate 
the world with a purer lustre, and ascend to 
that elevated station in the higher heavens 
where the fixed stars shed a splendid and im- 
perishable light. The writers whom party has 
elevated — the genius which vice has seduced, 
are destined to decline with the interests to 
which they were devoted, or the passions by 
which they were misled. The rise of new poli- 
tical struggles will consign to oblivion the 
vast talent which was engulfed in its conten- 
tion ; the accession of a more virtuous age 
bury in the dust the fancy which was enlisted 
in the cause of corruption ; while these illus- 
trious men, whose writings have struck root 
in the inmost recesses of the human heart, 
and been watered by the streams of imperish- 
able feeling, will for ever continue to elevate 
and bless a grateful world. 

To form a just conception of the importance 
of Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity, we 
must recollect the period when it was pub- 
lished, the character of the works it was in- 
tended to combat, and the state of society in 
which it was destined to appear. For half a 
century before it appeared, the whole genius 
of France had been incessantly directed to 
undermine the principles of religion. The 
days of Pascal and Fenelon, of Saurin and 
Bourdaloue, of Bossuet and Massillon, had 
passed away; the splendid talent of the seven- 
teenth century was no longer arrayed in the 
support of virtue — the supremacy of the church 
had ceased to be exerted to thunder in the ear 
of princes the awful truths of judgment to 
come. Borne away in the torrent of corrup- 
tion, the church itself had yielded to the in- 
creasing vices of the age ; its hierarchy had 
become involved in the passions they were 
destined to combat, and the cardinal's purple 
covered the shoulders of an associate in the 
midnight orgies of the Regent Orleans. Such 
was the audacity of vice, the recklessness of 
fashion, and the supineness of religion, that 
Madame Roland tells us, what astonished her 
in her youthful days was, that the heaven it- 
self did not open, to rain down upon the guilty 
metropolis, as on the cities of the Jordan, a 
tempest of consuming fire. 

While such was the profligacy of power and 
the audacity of crime, philosophic talent lent 
its aid to overwhelm the remaining safeguards 
of religious belief. The middle and the lower 
orders could not, indeed, participate in the 
luxurious vices of their wealthy superiors ; 
but they could well be persuaded that the faith 
which permitted such enormities, the religion 
which was stained by such crimes, was a sys- 



10 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 



tern of hypocrisy and deceit. The passion for 
innovation, which more than any other feature 
characterized that period in France, invaded 
the precincts of religion as well as the bul- 
warks of the state — the throne and the altar ; 
the restraints of this world and the next, as 
is ever the case, crumbled together. For half 
,a century, all the genius of France had been 
incessantly directed to overturn the sanctity 
of Christianity ; its corruptions were repre- 
sented as its very essence ; its abuses part of 
its necessary effects. Ridicule, ever more 
powerful than reason with a frivolous age, 
lent its aid to overturn the defenceless fabric; 
and for more than one generation, not one 
writer of note had appeared to maintain the 
hopeless cause. Voltaire and Diderot, DAlem- 
bert and Raynal, Laplace and Lagrange, had 
lent the weight of their illustrious names, or 
the powers of their versatile minds, to carry 
on the war. The Encyclopedic was a vast 
battery of infidelity incessantly directed against 
Christianity; while the crowd of licentious 
novelists, with which the age abounded — 
Louvet, Crebillon, Laclos, and a host of others 
— insinuated the poison, mixed up with the 
strongest allurements to the passions, and the 
most voluptuous seductions to the senses. 

This inundation of infidelity was soon fol- 
lowed by sterner days ; to the unrestrained in- 
dulgence of passion succeeded the unfettered 
march of crime. With the destruction of all 
the bonds which held society together ; with 
the removal of all the restraints on vice or guilt, 
the fabric of civilization and religion speedily 
was dissolved. To the licentious orgies of the 
Regent Orleans succeeded the infernal furies 
of the Revolution : from the same Palais Royal 
from whence had sprung those fountains of 
courtly corruption, soon issued forth the fiery 
streams of democracy. Enveloped in this 
burning torrent, the institutions, the faith, the 
nobles, the throne, were destroyed; the worst 
instruments of the supreme justice, the pas- 
sions and ambition of men, were suffered to 
work their unresisted way : and in a few years 
the religion of eighteen hundred years was 
abolished, its priests slain or exiled, its Sab- 
bath abolished, its rites proscribed, its faith 
unknown. Infancy came into the world with- 
out a blessing, age left it without a hope ; 
marriage no longer received a benediction, 
sickness was left without consolation ; the 
village bell ceased to call the poor to their 
weekly day of sanctity and repose ; the village 
churchyard to witness the. weeping train of 
mourners attending their rude forefathers to 
their last home. The grass grew in the 
churches of every parish in France ; the 
dead without a blessing were thrust into vast 
charnel-houses ; marriage was contracted be- 
fore a civil magistrate ; and infancy, untaught 
to pronounce the name of God, longed only 
for the period when the passions and indul- 
gencies of life were to commence. 

It was in these disastrous days that Chateau- 
briand arose, and bent the force of his lofty 
mind to restore the fallen but imperishable 
faith of his fathers. In early youth, he was at 
first carried away by the fashionable infidelity 
of his times; and in his " Essais Historiques," 



which he published in 1792, in London, while 
the principles of virtue and natural religion 
are unceasingly maintained, he seems to have 
doubted whether the Christian religion was 
not crumbling with the institutions of society, 
and speculated what faith was to be established 
on its ruins. But misfortune, that great cor- 
rector of the vices of the world, soon changed 
these faulty views. In the days of exile and 
adversity, when, by the waters of Babylon, he 
sat down and wept, he reverted to the faith 
and the belief of his fathers, and inhaled in 
the school of adversity those noble maxims 
of devotion and duty which have ever since 
regulated his conduct in life. Undaunted, 
though alone, he placed himself on the ruins 
of the Christian faith ; renewed, with Hercu- 
lean strength, a contest which the talents and 
vices of half a century had to all appearance 
rendered hopeless ; and, speaking to the hearts 
of men, now purified by suffering, and cleansed 
by the agonizing ordeal of revolution, scattered 
far and wide the seeds of a rational and a 
manly piety. Other writers have followed in 
the same noble career: Salvandy and Guizot 
have traced the beneficial effects of religion 
upon modern society, and drawn from the last 
results of revolutionary experience just and 
sublime conclusions as to the adaptation of 
Christianity to the wants of humanity; but it 
is the glory of Chateaubriand alone to have 
come forth the foremost in the fight; to have 
planted himself on the breach, when it was 
strewed only with the dead and the dying, and, 
strong in the consciousness of gigantic powers, 
stood undismayed against a nation in arms. 

To be successful in the contest, it was indis- 
pensable that the weapons of warfare should 
be totally changed. When the ideas of men 
were set adrift by revolutionary changes, when 
the authority of ages was set at nought, and 
from centuries of experience appeals were 
made to weeks of innovation, it was in vain to 
refer to the great or the wise of former ages. 
Perceiving at once the immense change which 
had taken place in the world whom he ad- 
dressed, Chateaubriand saw, that he must alter 
altogether the means by which they were to 
be influenced. Disregarding, therefore, entirely 
the weight of authority, laying aside almost 
every thing which had been advanced in sup- 
port of religion by its professed disciples, he 
applied himself to accumulate the conclusions 
in its favour which arose from its internal 
beauty; from its beneficent effect upon society; 
from the changes it had wrought upon the 
civilization, the happiness, and destinies of 
mankind; from its analogy with the sublimest 
tenets of natural religion; from its unceasing 
progress, its indefinite extension, and undecay- 
ing youth. He observed, that it drew its sup- 
port from such hidden recesses of the human 
heart, that it flourished most in periods of dis- 
aster and calamity ; derived strength from the 
fountains of suffering, and, banished in all but 
form from the palaces of princes, spread its 
roots far and wide in the cottages of the poor. 
From the intensity of suffering produced by 
the Revolution, therefore, he conceived the 
hope, that the feelings of religion would ulti- 
mately resume their sway : when the waters 



CHATEAUBRIAND. 



11 



of bitterness were let loose, the consolations 
of devotion would again be felt to be indispen- 
sable; and the spirit of the gospel, banished 
during the sunshine of corrupt prosperity, re- 
turn to the repentant human heart with the 
tears and the storms of adversity. 

Proceeding on these just and sublime prin- 
ciples, this great author availed himself of 
every engine which fancy, experience, or poe- 
try could suggest, to sway the hearts of his 
readers. He knew well that he was address- 
ing an impassioned and volatile generation, 
upon whom reason would be thrown away, if 
not enforced with eloquence, and argument 
lost, if not clothed in the garb of fancy. To 
effect his purpose, therefore, of re-opening in 
the hearts of his readers the all but extin- 
guished fountains of religious feeling, he sum- 
moned to his aid the whole aid which learn- 
ing, or travelling, or poetry, or fancy, could 
supply; and scrupled not to employ his 
powers as a writer of romance, an historian, 
a descriptive traveller, and a poet, to forward 
the great work of Christian renovation. Of 
his object in doing this, he has himself given 
the following account.* 

"There can be no doubt that the Genius of 
Christianity would have been a work entirely 
out of place in the age of Louis XIV.; and the 
critic who observed that Massillon would never 
have published such a book, spoke an un- 
doubted truth. Most certainly the author would 
never have thought of writing such a work if 
there had not existed a host of poems, romances, 
and books of all sorts, where Christianity was 
exposed to every species of derision. But 
since these poems, romances, and books exist, 
and are in every one's hands, it becomes in- 
dispensable to extricate religion from the sar- 
casms of impiety; when it has been written 
on all sides that Christianity is ' barbarous, 
ridiculous, the eternal enemy of the arts and of 
genius ;' it is necessary to prove that it is neither 
barbarous, nor ridiculous, nor the enemy of 
arts or of genius ; and that that which is made 
by the pen of ridicule to appear diminutive, 
ignoble, in bad taste, without either charms or 
tenderness, may be made to appear grand, 
noble, simple, impressive, and divine, in the 
hands of a man of religious feeling. 

" If it is not permitted to defend religion on 
what may be called its terrestrial side, if no 
effort is to be made to prevent ridicule from 
attaching to its sublime institutions, there will 
always remain a weak and undefended quarter. 
There all the strokes at it will be aimed ; there 
you will be caught without defence; from 
thence you will receive your death-wound. Is 
not that what has already arrived 1 Was it 
not by ridicule and pleasantry that Voltaire 
succeeded in shaking the foundations of faith 1 
Will you attempt to answer by theological 
arguments, or the forms of the syllogism, licen- 
tious novels or irreligious epigrams'? Will 
formal disquisitions ever prevent an infidel 
generation from being carried away by clever 
verses, or deterred from the altar by the fear 
of ridicule 1 Does not every one know that in 

* All the passages cited are translated by ourselves. 
There is an English version, we believe, but we have 
never seen it. 



the French nation a happy bon-mot, impiety 
clothed in a felicitous expression, ifelix culpa, 
produce a greater effect than volumes of 
reasoning or metaphysics ? Persuade young 
men that an honest man can be a Christian 
without being a fool ; convince him that he is 
in error when he believes that none but capu- 
chins and old women believe in religion, and 
your cause is gained ; it will be time enough 
to complete the victory to present yourself 
armed with theological reasons, but what you 
must begin with is an inducement to read 
your book. What is most needed is a popular 
work on religion; those who have hitherto 
written on it have too often fallen into the 
error of the traveller who tries to get his com- 
panion at one ascent to the summit of a rugged 
mountain when he can hardly crawl at its 
foot — you must show him at every step varied 
and agreeable objects; allow him to stop to 
gather the flowers which are scattered along 
his path, and from one resting-place to another 
he will at length gain the summit. 

"The author has not intended this work 
merely for scholars, priests, or doctors ; what 
he wrote for was the men of the world, and 
what he aimed at chiefly were the considera- 
tions calculated to affect their minds. If you 
do not keep steadily in view that principle, if 
you forget for a moment the class of readers 
for whom the Genius of Christianity was in- 
tended, you will understand nothing of this 
work. It was intended to be read by the most 
incredulous man of letters, the most volatile 
youth of pleasure, with the same facility as 
the first turns over a work of impiety, or the 
second devours a corrupting novel. Do you 
intend then, exclaim the well-meaning ad- 
vocates for Christianity, to render religion a 
matter of fashion 1 Would to God, I reply, 
that that divine religion was really in fashion, 
in the sense that what is fashionable indicates 
the prevailing opinion of the world ! Individual 
hypocrisy, indeed, might be increased by such 
a change, but public morality would unques- 
tionably be a gainer. The rich would no longer 
make it a point of vanity to corrupt the poor, 
the master to pervert the mind of his domestic, 
the fathers of families to pour lessons of athe- 
ism into their children ; the practice of piety 
would lead to a belief in its truths, and with 
the devotion we should see revive the manners 
and the virtues of the best ages of the world. 

"Voltaire, when he attacked Christianity, 
knew mankind well enough not to seek to 
avail himself of what is called the opinion of 
the world, and with that view he employed his 
talents to bring impiety into fashion. He suc- 
ceeded by rendering religion ridiculous in the 
eyes of a frivolous generation. It is this ridi- 
cule which the author of the Genius of Chris- 
tianity has, beyond every thing, sought to 
efface; that was the object of his work. He 
may have failed in the execution, but the ob- 
ject surely was highly important. To con- 
sider Christianity in its relation with human 
society; to trace the changes which it has 
effected in the reason and the passions of 
man ; to show how it has modified the genius 
of arts and of letters, moulded the spirit of 
modern nations ; in a word, te unfold all the 



12 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



marvels which religion has wrought in the 
regions of poetry, moral ity, politics, history, 
and public charity, must always be esteemed 
a noble undertaking. As to its execution, he 
abandons himself, with submission, to the 
criticisms of those who appreciate the spirit 
of the design. 

" Take, for example, a picture, professedly 
of an impious tendency, and place beside it 
another picture on the same subject from the 
Genius of Christianity, and I will venture to 
affirm that the latter picture, however feebly 
executed, will weaken the impression of the 
first, so powerful is the effect of simple truth 
when compared to the most brilliant sophisms. 
Voltaire has frequently turned the religious 
orders into ridicule ; well, put beside one of 
his burlesque representations the chapter on 
the Missions, that where the order of the 
Hospitallers is depicted as succouring the 
travellers in the desert, or the monks relieving 
the sick in the hospitals, attending those dying 
of the plague in the lazarettos, or accompany- 
ing the criminal to the scaffold, what irony 
will not be disarmed — what malicious smile 
will not be converted into tears ? Answer the 
reproaches made to the worship of the Chris- 
tians for their ignorance, by appealing to the 
immense labours of the ecclesiastics who 
saved from destruction the manuscripts of 
antiquity. Reply to the accusations of bad 
taste and barbarity, by referring to the works 
of Bossuet and Fenelon. Oppose to the carica- 
tures of saints and of angels, the sublime effects 
of Christianity on the dramatic part of poetry, 
on eloquence, and the fine arts, and say 
whether the impression of ridicule will long 
maintain its ground 1 Should the author have 
no other success than that of having displayed 
before the eyes of an infidel age a long series 
of religious pictures without exciting disgust, 
he would deem his labours not useless to the 
cause of humanity." — III. 263 — 266. 

These observations appear to us as just as 
they are profound, and they are the reflections 
not merely of a sincere Christian, but a man 
practically acquainted with the state of the 
world. It is of the utmost importance, no 
doubt, that there should exist works on the 
Christian faith, in which the arguments of the 
skeptic should be combated, and to which the 
Christian disciple might refer with confidence 
for a refutation of the objections which have 
been urged against his religion. But great as 
is the merit of such productions, their bene- 
ficial effects are limited in their operation com- 
pared with those which are produced by such 
writings as we are considering. The hardened 
sceptic will never turn to a work on divinity 
for a solution of his paradoxes ; and men of 
the world can never be persuaded to enter on 
serious arguments even on the most moment- 
ous subject of human belief. It is the indiffer- 
ence, not the skepticism of such men, which is 
chiefly to be dreaded: the danger to be appre- 
hended is not that they will say there is no 
God, but that they will live altogether without 
God in the world. It has happened but too 
frequently that divines, in their zeal for the 
progress of Christianity among such men, 
have augmented the very evil they intended to 



remove. They have addressed themselves in 
general to them as if they were combatants 
drawn out in a theological dispute ; they have 
urged a mass of arguments which they were 
unable to refute, but which were too uninterest- 
ing to be even examined, and while they flat- 
tered themselves that they had effectually 
silenced their opponents' objections, those 
whom they addressed have silently passed by 
on the other side. It is, therefore, of incalcu- 
lable importance that some writings should 
exist which should lead men imperceptibly into 
the ways of truth, which should insinuate 
themselves into the tastes, and blend them- 
selves with the refinements of ordinary life, 
and perpetually recur to the cultivated mind 
with all that it admires, or loves, or venerates, 
in the world. 

Nor let it be imagined that reflections such 
as these are not the appropriate theme of re- 
ligious instruction — that they do not form the 
fit theme of Christian meditation. Whatever 
leads our minds habitually to the Author of 
the Universe; — whatever mingles the voice 
of nature with the revelation of the gospel ; — 
whatever teaches us to see, in all the changes 
of the world, the varied goodness of him, in 
whom "we live, and move, and have our 
being," — brings us nearer to the spirit of the 
Saviour of mankind. But it is not only as 
encouraging a sincere devotion, that these re- 
flections are favourable to Christianity; there 
is something, moreover, peculiarly allied to its 
spirit in such observations of external nature. 
When our Saviour prepared himself for his 
temptation, his agony, and death, he retired to 
the wilderness of Judaea, to inhale, we may 
venture to believe, a holier spirit amidst its 
solitary scenes, and to approach to a nearer 
communion with his Father, amidst the sub- 
limest of his works. It is with similar feelings, 
and to worship the same Father, that the 
Christian is permitted to enter the temple of 
nature ; and by the spirit of his religion, there 
is a language infused into the objects which 
she presents, unknown to the worshipper of 
former times. To all indeed the same objects 
appear — the same sun shines — the same hea- 
vens are open: but to the Christian alone it is 
permitted to know the Author of these things; 
to see his spirit "move in the breeze and 
blossom in the spring," and to read, in the 
changes which occur in the material world, 
the varied expression of eternal love. It is 
from the influence of Christianity accordingly 
that the key has been given to the signs of 
nature. It was only when the Spirit of God 
moved on the face of the deep, that order and 
beauty was seen in the world. 

It is accordingly peculiarly well worthy of 
observation, that the beauty of nature, as felt in 
modern times, seems to have been almost un- 
known to the writers of antiquity. They de- 
scribed occasionally the scenes in which they 
dwelt; but, if we except Virgil, whose gentle 
mind seems to have anticipated, in this in- 
stance, the influence of the gospel, never with 
any deep feeling of their beauty. Then, as 
now, the citadel of Athens looked upon the 
evening sun, and her temples flamed in his 
setting beam; but what Athenian writer ever 



CHATEAUBRIAND. 



13 



described the matchless glories of the scene ] 
Then, as now, the silvery clouds of the JEgea.n 
sea rolled round her verdant isles, and sported 
in the azure vault of heaven; but what Gre- 
cian poet has been inspired by the sight] The 
Italian lakes spread their waves beneath a 
cloudless sky, and all that is lovely in nature 
was gathered around them ; yet even Eustace 
tells us, that a few detached lines is all that is 
left in regard to them by the Roman poets. 
The Alps themselves, 

"The palaces of nature, whose vast walls 
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, 
And throned eternity in icy halls 
Of cold suhlimity, where forms and falls 
The avalanche — the thunderbolts of snow." 

Even these, the most glorious objects which 
the eye of man can behold, were regarded by 
the ancients with sentiments only of dismay 
or horror; as a barrier from hostile nations, or 
as the dwelling of barbarous tribes. The torch 
of religion had not then lightened the face of 
nature; they knew not the language which 
she spoke, nor felt that holy spirit, which to 
the Christian gives the sublimity of these 
scenes. 

Chateaubriand divides his great work into 
four parts. The first treats of the doctrinal 
parts of religion : the second and the third, 
the relations of that religion with poetry, litera- 
ture, and the arts. The fourth, the ceremonies 
of public worship, and the services rendered 
to mankind by the clergy, regular and secular. 
On the mysteries of faith he commences with 
these fine observations. 

" There is nothing beautiful, sweet, or grand 
in life, but in its mysteries. The sentiments 
which agitate us most strongly are enveloped 
in obscurity; modesty, virtuous love, sincere 
frindship, have all their secrets, with which the 
world must not be made acquainted. Hearts 
which love understand each other by a word; 
half of each is at all times open to the other. 
Innocence itself is but a holy ignorance, and 
the most ineffable of mysteries. Infancy is 
only happy, because it as yet knows nothing; 
age miserable, because it has nothing more to 
learn. Happily for it, when the mysteries of 
life are ending, those of immortality commence. 

"If it is thus with the sentiments, it is as- 
suredly not less so with the virtues ; the most 
angelic are those which, emanating directly 
from the Deity, such as charity, love to with- 
draw themselves from all regards, as if fear- 
ful to betray their celestial origin. 

"If we turn to the understanding, we shall 
find that the pleasures of thought also have a 
certain connection with the mysterious. To 
what sciences do we unceasingly return] To 
those which always leave something still to 
be discovered, and fix our regards on a per- 
spective which is never to terminate. If we 
wander in the desert, a sort of instinct leads 
us to shun the plains where the eye embraces 
at once the whole circumference of nature, to 
plunge into forests, those forests the cradle of 
religion, whose shades and solitudes are filled 
with the recollections of prodigies, where the 
ravens and the doves nourished the prophets 
and fathers of the church. If we visit a modern 
monument, whose origin or destination is 



known, it excites no attention; but if we meet 
on a desert isle, in the midst of the ocean, 
with a mutilated statue pointing to the west, 
with its pedestal covered with hieroglyphics, 
and worn by the winds, what a subject of 
meditation is presented to the traveller ! Every 
thing is concealed, every thing is hidden in 
the universe. Man himself is the greatest 
mystery of the whole. Whence comes the 
spark which we call existence, and in what 
obscurity is it to be extinguished] The Eter- 
nal has placed our birth, and our death, under 
the form of two veiled phantoms, at the two 
extremities of our career; the one produces 
the inconceivable gift of life, which the other 
is ever ready to devour. 

" It is not surprising, then, considering the 
passion of the human mind for the mysterious, 
that the religions of every country should 
have had their impenetrable secrets. God 
forbid ! that I should compare their mysteries 
to those of the true faith, or the unfathomable 
depths of the Sovereign in the heavens, to the 
changing obscurities of those gods which are 
the work of human hands. All that I observe 
is, that there is no religion without mysteries, 
and that it is they with the sacrifice which every 
where constitute the essence of the worship. 
God is the great secret of nature, the Deity was 
veiled in Egypt, and the Sphynx was seated at 
the entrance of his temples." — I. 13, 14. 

On the three great sacraments of the Church, 
Baptism, Confession, and the Communion, he 
makes the following beautiful observations : — 

"Baptism, the first of the sacraments which 
religion confers upon man, clothes him, in the 
words of the Apostle, with Jesus Christ. That 
sacrament reveals at once the corruption in 
which we were born, the agonizing pains 
which attended our birth, and the tribulations 
which follow us into the world; it tells us that 
our faults will descend upon our children, and 
that we are all jointly responsible ; a terrible 
truth, which, if duly considered, would alone 
suffice to render the reign of virtue universal 
in the world. 

" Behold the infant in the midst of the waters 
of the Jordan ; the man of the wilderness pours 
the purifying stream on his head ; the river of 
the Patriarchs, the camels on its banks, the 
Temple of Jerusalem, the cedars of Lebanon, 
seem to regard with interest the mighty spec- 
tacle. Behold in mortal life that infant near 
the sacred fountain ; a family filled with thank- 
fulness surround it ; renounce in its name the 
sins of the world ; bestow on it with joy the 
name of its grandfather, which seems thus to 
become immortal, in its perpetual renova- 
tion by the fruits of love from generation 
to generation. Even now the father is im- 
patient to take his infant in his arms, to re- 
place it in its mother's bosom, who listens be- 
hind the curtains to all the thrilling sounds of 
the sacred ceremony. The whole family sur- 
round the maternal bed ; tears of joy, mingled 
with the transports of religion, fall from every 
eye ; the new name of the infant, the old name 
of its ancestor, is repeated by every mouth, 
and every one mingling the recollections of 
the past with the joys of the present, thinks 
that he sees the venerable grandfather revive 
B 



14 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



in the new-born which has taken his name. 
Such is the domestic spectacle which through- 
out all the Christian world the sacrament of 
Baptism presents ; but religion, ever mingling 
lessons of duty with scenes of joy, shows us 
the son of kings clothed in purple, renouncing 
the grandeur of the world, at the same fountain 
where the child of the poor in rags abjures 
the pomps by which he will in all probability 
never be tempted. 

"Confession follows baptism; and the 
Church, with that wisdom which it alone 
possesses, fixed the era of its commencement 
at that period when first the idea of crime can 
enter the infant mind, that is at seven years of 
age. All men, including the philosophers, 
how different soever their opinions may be on 
other subjects, have regarded the sacrament 
of penitence as one of the strongest barriers 
against crime, and a chef-d'oeuvre of wisdom. 
"What innumerable restitutions and repara- 
tions, says Rousseau, has confession caused to 
be made in Catholic countries ! According to 
Voltaire, ' Confession is an admirable inven- 
tion, a bridle to crime, discovered in the most 
remote antiquity, for confession was recognised 
in the celebration of all the ancient mysteries. 
We have adopted and sanctified that wise 
custom, and its effects have always been found 
to be admirable in inclining hearts, ulcerated 
by hatred, to forgiveness.' 

" But for that salutary institution, the guilty 
would give way to despair. In what bosom 
would he discharge the weight of his heart? 
In that of a friend — Who can trust the friend- 
ships of the world ? Shall he take the deserts 
for a confident? Alas! the deserts are ever 
filled to the ear of crime with those trumpets 
which the parricide Nero heard round the 
tomb of his mother. When men and nature 
are unpitiable, it is indeed consolatory to find 
a Deity inclined to pardon ; but it belongs only 
to the Christian religion to have made twin 
sisters of Innocence and Repentance. 

" In fine, the Communion presents instruc- 
tive ceremony ; it teaches morality, for we 
must be pure to approach it; it is the offering 
of the fruits of the earth to the Creator, and it 
recalls the sublime and touching history of 
the Son of Man. Blended with the recollection 
of Easter, and of the first covenant of God with 
man, the origin of the communion is lost in 
the obscurity of an infant world; it is related 
to our first ideas of religion and society, and 
recalls the pristine equality of the human 
race ; in fine, it perpetuates the recollection of 
our primeval fall, of our redemption, and re- 
acceptance by God." — I. 30 — 46. 

These and similar passages, not merely in 
this work, which professes to be of a popular 
cast, but in others of the highest class of 
Catholic divinity, suggest an idea which, the 
more we extend our reading, the more we shall 
find to be just, viz., that in the greater and 
purer writers on religion, of whatever church 
or age, the leading doctrines are nearly the 
same, and that the differences which divide 
their followers, and distract the world, are 
seldom, on any material or important points, 
to be met with in writers of a superior caste. 
Chateaubriand is a faithful, and in some re- 



spects, perhaps, a bigoted, Catholic; yet there 
is hardly a word here, or in any other part of 
his writings on religion, to which a Christian 
in any country may not subscribe, and which 
is not calculated in all ages and places to for- 
ward the great work of the purification and 
improvement of the human heart. Travellers 
have often observed, that in a certain rank in 
all countries manners are the same; naturalists 
know, that at a certain elevation above the 
sea in all latitudes, we meet with the same 
vegetable productions ; and philosophers have 
often remarked, that in the highest class of in- 
tellects, opinions on almost every subject in 
all ages and places are the same. A similar 
uniformity may be observed in the principles 
of the greatest writers of the world on religion : 
and while the inferior followers of their dif- 
ferent tenets branch out into endless divisions, 
and indulge in sectarian rancour, in the more 
lofty regions of intellect the principles are 
substantially the same, and the objects of all 
identical. So small a proportion do all the 
disputed points in theology bear to the great 
objects of religion, love to God, charity to man, 
and the subjugation of human passion. 

On the subject of marriage, and the reasons 
for its indissolubility, our author presents us 
with the following beautiful observations : — 

" Habit and a long life together are more 
necessary to happiness, and even to love, than 
is generally imagined. No one is happy with 
the object of his attachment until he has passed 
many days, and above all, many days of mis- 
fortune, with her. The married pair must 
know each other to the bottom of their souls ; 
the mysterious veil which covered the two 
spouses in the primitive church, must be 
raised in its inmost folds, how closely soever 
it may be kept drawn to the rest of the world. 

" What! on account of a fit of caprice, or 
a burst of passion, am I to be exposed to the 
fear of losing my wife and my children, and to 
renounce the hope of passing my declining 
days with them? Let no one imagine that 
fear will make me become a better husband. 
No ; we do not attach ourselves to a posses- 
sion of which we are not secure ; we do not 
love a property which we are in danger of 
losing. 

" We must not give to Hymen the wings of 
Love, nor make of a sacred reality a fleeting 
phantom. One thing is alone sufficient to de- 
stroy your happiness in such transient unions ; 
you will constantly compare one to the other, 
the wife you have lost to the one you have 
gained ; and do not deceive yourself, the balance 
will always incline to the past, for so God has 
constructed the human heart. This distraction 
of a sentiment which should be indivisible 
will empoison all your joys. When you 
caress your new infant, you will think of the 
smiles of the one you have lost; when you 
press your wife to your bosom, your heart will 
tell you that she is not the first. Every thing 
in man tends to unity; he is no longer happy 
when he is divided, and, like God, who made 
him in his image, his soul seeks incessantly to 
concentrate into one point the past, the pre- 
sent, and the future. 

" The wife of* a Christian is not a simple 



CHATEAUBRIAND. 



15 



mortal: she is a mysterious angelic being: 
the flesh of the flesh, the blood of the blood of 
her husband. Man, in uniting himself to her, 
does nothing but regain part of the substance 
which he has lost. His soul as well as his 
body are incomplete without his wife: he has 
strength, she has beauty ; he combats the 
enemy and labours the fields, but he under- 
stands nothing of domestic life; his companion 
is awanting to prepare his repast and sweeten 
his existence. He has his crosses, and the 
partner of his couch is there to soften them : 
his days may be sad and troubled, but in the 
chaste arms of his wife he finds comfort and 
repose. Without woman man would be rude, 
gross, and solitary. Woman spreads around 
him the flowers of existence, as the creepers 
of the forests which decorate the trunks of 
sturdy oaks with their perfumed garlands. 
Finally, the Christian pair live and die united: 
together they rear the fruits of their union; 
in the dust they lie side by side ; and they are 
reunited beyond the limits of the tomb." — I. 
78, 79. 

The extreme unction of the Catholic Church 
is described in these touching words : 

"Come and behold the most moving spec- 
tacle which the world can exhibit — the death 
of the faithful. The dying Christian is no 
longer a man of this world; he belongs no 
farther to his country; all his relations with 
society have ceased. For him the calculations 
of time are closed, and the great era of eternity 
has commenced. A priest seated beside his 
bed pours the consolations of religion into his 
dying ear : the holy minister converses with 
the expiring penitent on the immortality of the 
soul ; and that sublime scene which antiquity 
presented but once in the death of the greatest 
of her philosophers, is renewed every day at 
the couch where the humblest of the Christians 
expires. 

" At length the supreme moment arrives : 
one sacrament has opened the gates of the 
world, another is about to close them ; religion 
rocked the cradle of existence; its sweet 
strains and its maternal hand will lull it to 
sleep in the arms of death. It prepares the 
baptism of a second existence ; but it is no 
longer with water, but oil, the emblem of 
celestial incorruption. The liberating sacra- 
ment dissolves, one by one, the chords which 
attach the faithful to this world : the soul, half 
escaped from its earthly prison, is almost visi- 
ble to the senses, in the smile which plays 
around his lips. Already he hears the music 
of the seraphims ; already he longs to fly to 
those regions, where hope divine, daughter of 
virtue and death, beckons him to approach. 
At length the angel of peace, descending from 
the heavens, touches with his golden sceptre 
his wearied eyelids, and closes them in deli- 
cious repose to the light. He dies : and so 
sweet has been his departure, that no one has 
heard his last sigh; and his friends, long after 
he is no more, preserve silence round his 
couch, still thinking that he slept; so like the 
sleep of infancy is the death of the just." — I. 
69—71. 

It is against pride, as every one knows, 
at the chief efforts of the Catholic Church 



have always been directed, because they con- 
sider it as the source of all other crime. 
Whether this is a just view may, perhaps, be 
doubted, to the extent at least that they carry 
it ; but there can be but one opinion as to the 
eloquence of the apology which Chateaubriand 
makes for this selection. 

"In the virtues preferred by Christianity,, 
we perceive the same knowledge of human 
nature. Before the coming of Christ, the soul 
of man was a chaos ; but no sooner was the 
word heard, than all the elements arranged 
themselves in the moral world, as at the same 
divine inspiration they had produced the mar- 
vels of material creation. The virtues ascended 
like pure fires into the heavens; some, like 
brilliant suns, attracted the regards by their 
resplendent light; others, more modest, sought- 
the shade, where nevertheless their lustre 
could not be concealed. From that moment 
an admirable balance was established between 
the forces and the weaknesses of existence. 
Religion directed its thunders against pride, 
the vice which is nourished by the virtues ; it 
discovers it in the inmost recesses of the heart, 
and follows it out in all its metamorphoses ;, 
the sacraments in a holy legion march against 
it, while humility, clothed in sackcloth and 
ashes, its eyes downcast and bathed in tears, 
becomes one of the chief virtues of the faith- 
ful."— I. 74. 

On the tendency of all the fables concerning 
creation to remount to one general and eternal 
truth, our author presents the following reflec- 
tions : 

" After this exposition of the dreams of 
philosophy, it may seem useless to speak of 
the fancy of the poets. Who does not know 
Deucalion and Pyrrha, the age of gold and of 
iron 1 What innumerable traditions are scat- 
tered through the earth ! In India, an elephant 
sustains the globe ; the sun in Peru has brought 
forth all the marvels of existence; in Canada, 
the Great Spirit is the father of the world ; in 
Greenland, man has emerged from an egg ; in 
fine, Scandinavia has beheld the birth of Askur 
and Emla; Odin has poured in the breath of 
life, Hasnerus reason, and Loedur blood and 
beauty. 

' Askum et Emlam omni conatu destitutes 
Animam nee possidebant. rationem nee habebant 
Nee sanguinem, nee sermonem, nee faciem venustam, 
Animam dedit Odinus, rationem dedit Hoenerus, 
Loedur sanguinem addidit et faciem venustam.' 

"In these various traditions, we find our- 
selves placed between the stories of children 
and the abstractions of philosophers ; if we 
were obliged to choose, it were better to take 
the first. 

" But to discover the original of the picture 
in the midst of so many copies, we must recur 
to that which, by its unity and the perfection 
of its parts, unfolds the genius of a master. 
It is that which we find in Genesis, the original 
of all those pictures which we see reproduced 
in so many different traditions. What can be 
at once more natural and more magnificent- 
more easy to conceive, and more in unison 
with human reason, than the Creator descend- 
ing amidst the night of ages to create light by 
a word ? In an instant, the sun is seen sus- 
pended in the heavens, in the midst of an im 



10 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



•mense azure vault; with invisible bonds he 
envelopes the planets, and whirls them round 
his burning axle ; the sea and the forests ap- 
pear on the globe, and their earliest voices 
arise to announce to the universe that great 
marriage, of which God is the priest, the earth 
the nuptial couch, and the human race the 
posterity."— I. 97, 98. 

On the appearance of age on the globe, and 
its first aspect when fresh from the hands of 
the Creator, the author presents an hypothesis 
more in unison with the imagination of a poet 
than the observations of a philosopher, on the 
gradual formation of all objects destined for a 
long endurance. He supposes that every thing 
was at once created as we now see it. 

" It is probable that the Author of nature 
planted at once aged forests and their youthful 
progeny ; that animals arose at the same time, 
some full of years, others buoyant with the 
vigour and adorned with the grace of youth. 
The oaks, while they pierced with their roots 
the fruitful earth, without doubt bore at once 
the old nests of rooks, and the young progeny 
of doves. At once grew a chrysalis and a 
butterfly ; the insect bounded on the grass, 
suspended its golden egg in the forests, or 
trembled in the undulations of the air. The 
bee, which had not yet lived a morning, already 
counted the generations of flowers by its 
ambrosia — the sheep was not without its lamb, 
the d'.e without its fawns. The thickets already 
contained the nightingale, astonished at the 
melody of their first airs, as they poured forth 
the new-born effusion of their infant loves. 

" Had the world not arisen at once young 
and old, the grand, the serious, the impressive, 
would have disappeared from nature ; for all 
these sentiments depend for their very essence 
on ancient things. The marvels of existence 
would have been unknown. The ruined rock 
would not have hung over the abyss beneath ; 
the woods would not have exhibited that 
splendid variety of trunks bending under the 
weight of years, of trees hanging over the bed 
of streams. The inspired thoughts, the vene- 
rated sounds, the magic voices, the sacred hor- 
ror of the forests, would have vanished with 
the vaults which serve for their retreats ; and 
the solitudes of earth and heaven would have 
remained naked and disenchanted in losing the 
columns of oaks which united them. On the 
first day when the ocean dashed against the 
shore, he bathed, be assured, sands bearing all 
the marks of the action of his waves for ages ; 
cliffs strewed with the eggs of innumerable sea- 
fowl, and rugged capes which sustained against 
the waters the crumbling shores of the earth. 

" Without that primeval age, there would 
have been neither pomp nor majesty in the 
work of the Most High; and, contrary to all 
our conceptions, nature in the innocence of 
man would have been less beautiful than it is 
now in the days of his corruption. An insipid 
childhood of plants, of animals, of elements, 
would have covered the earth, without the 
poetical feelings, which now constitute its 
principal charm. But God was not so feeble 
a designer of the grove of Eden as the incredu- 
lous would lead us to believe. Man, the sove- 
reign of nature, was born at thirty years of age, 



in order that his powers should correspond 
with the full-grown magnificence of his new 
empire, — while his consort, doubtless, had 
already passed her sixteenth spring, though 
yet in the slumber of nonentity, that she might 
be in harmony with the flowers, the birds, the 
innocence, the love, the beauty of the youthful 
part of the universe." — I. 137, 138. 

In the rhythm of prose these are the colours 
of poetry, but still this was not to all appear- 
ance the order of creation ; and here, as in 
many other instances, it will be found that the 
deductions of experience present concisions 
more sublime than the most fervid imagina- 
tion has been able to conceive. Every thing 
announces that the great works of nature are 
carried on by slow and insensible gradations ; 
continents, the abode of millions, are formed 
by the confluence of innumerable rills ; vege- 
tation, commencing with the lichen and the 
moss, rises at length into the riches and magni- 
ficence of the forest. Patient analysis, philo- 
sophical discovery, have now taught us that it 
was by the same slow progress that the great 
work of creation was accomplished. The fos- 
sil remains of antediluvian ages have laid open 
the primeval works of nature; the long period 
which elapsed before the creation of man, the 
vegetables which then covered the earth, the 
animals which sported amidst its watery wastes, 
the life which first succeeded to chaos, all 
stand revealed. To the astonishment of man- 
kind, the order of creation, unfolded in Genesis, 
is proved by the contents of the earth beneath 
every part of its surface to be precisely that 
which has actually been followed; the days of 
the Creator's workmanship turn out to be the 
days of the Most High, not of his uncreated 
subjects, and to correspond to ages of our 
ephemeral existence ; and the great sabbath 
of the earth took place, not, as we imagined, 
when the sixth sun had set after the first morn- 
ing had beamed, but when the sixth period had 
expired, devoted by Omnipotence to the mighty 
undertaking. God then rested from his labours, 
because the great changes of matter, and the 
successive production and annihilation of dif- 
ferent kinds of animated existence, ceased ; 
creation assumed a settled form, and laws 
came into operation destined for indefinite en- 
durance. Chateaubriand said truly, that to 
man, when he first opened his eyes on paradise, 
nature appeared with all the majesty of age as 
well as all the freshness of youth; but it was 
not in a week, but during a series of ages, that 
the magnificent spectacle had been assembled ; 
and for the undying delight of his progeny, in 
all future years, the powers of nature for count- 
less time had been already exerted. 

The fifth book of the Genie de Christianisme 
treats of the proofs of the existence of God, 
derived from the wonders of material nature — 
in other words, of the splendid subject of 
natural theology. On such a subject, the ob- 
servations of a mind so stored with knowledge, 
and gifted with such powers of eloquence, may 
be expected to be something of extraordinary 
excellence. Though the part of his work, ac- 
cordingly, which treats of this subject, is neces- 
sarily circumscribed, from the multitude of 
others with which it is overwhelmed, it is of 



CHATEAUBRIAND. 



17 



surpassing beauty, and superior in point of 
description to any thing which has been pro- 
duced on the same subject by the genius of 
Britain. 

" There is a God ! The herbs of the valley, 
the cedars of the mountain, bless him — the in- 
sect sports in his beams — the elephant salutes 
him with the rising orb of the day — the bird 
sings him in the foliage — the thunder pro- 
claims him in the heavens — the ocean declares 
his immensity — man alone has said, 'There is 
no God !' 

" Unite in thought, at the same instant, the 
most beautiful objects in nature; suppose that 
you see at once all the hours of the day, and 
all the seasons of the year; a morning of 
spring and a morning of autumn ; a night be- 
spangled with stars, and a night covered 
with clouds; meadows enamelled with flowers, 
forests hoary with snow; fields gilded by the 
tints of autumn ; then alone you will have a 
just conception of the universe. While you 
are gazing on that sun which is plunging 
under the vault of the west, another observer 
admires him emerging from the gilded gates of 
the east. By what unconceivable magic does 
that aged star, which is sinking fatigued and 
burning in the shades of the evening, reappear 
at the same instant fresh and humid with the 
rosy dew of the morning] At every instant 
of the day the glorious orb is at once rising — 
resplendent at noonday, and setting in the 
west; or rather our senses deceive us, and 
there is, properly speaking, no east, or south, 
or west in the world. Every thing reduces 
itself to one single point, from whence the 
King of Day sends forth at once a triple light 
in one single substance. The bright splendour 
is perhaps that which nature can present that 
is most beautiful; for while it gives us an idea 
of the perpetual magnificence and resistless 
power of God, it exhibits, at the same time, a 
shining image of the glorious Trinity." 

The instincts of animals, and their adapta- 
tion to the wants of their existence, have long 
furnished one of the most interesting subjects 
of study to the naturalist, and of meditation to 
the devout observer of creation. Chateau- 
briand has painted, with his usual descriptive 
powers, one of the most familiar of these ex- 
amples — 

" What ingenious springs move the feet of a 
bird! It is not by a contraction of muscles 
dependent on his will that he maintains him- 
self firm upon a branch ; his foot is constructed 
in such a way that when it is pressed in the 
centre, the toes close of their own accord 
tipon the body which supporte it. It results 
from this mechanism, that the talons of the 
bird grasp more or less firmly the object on 
which it has alighted, in proportion to the 
agitation, more or less violent, which it has 
received. Thus, when we see at the approach 
of night during winter the crows perched on 
the scathed summit of an aged oak, we sup- 
pose that, watchful and attentive, they main- 
tain their place with pain during the rocking 
of the winds; and yet, heedless of danger, and 
mocking the tempest, the winds only bring 
them profounder slumber; — the blasts of the 
north attach them more firmly to the branch, 



from whence we every instant expect to see 
them precipitated ; and like the old seaman, 
whose hammock is suspended to the roof of 
his vessel, the more he is tossed by the winds, 
the more profound is his repose." — I. 147, 148. 
"Amidst the different instincts which the 
Sovereign of the universe has implanted in 
nature, one of the most wonderful is that 
which every year brings the fish of the pole 
to our temperate region. They come, without 
once mistaking their way, through the solitude 
of the ocean, to reach, on a fixed day, the 
stream where their hymen is to be celebrated. 
The spring prepares on our shores their nuptial 
pomp ; it covers the willows with verdure, it 
spreads beds of moss in the waves to serve 
for curtains to its crystal couches. Hardly 
are these preparations completed when the 
enamelled legions appear; the animated navi- 
gators enliven our coasts; some spring aloft 
from the surface of the waters, others balance 
themselves on the waves, or diverge from a 
common centre like innumerable flashes of 
gold; these dart obliquely their shining bodies 
athwart the azure fluid, while they sleep in 
the rays of the sun, which penetrates beneath 
the dancing surface of the waves. All, sport- 
ing in the joys of existence, meander, return, 
wheel about, dash across, form in squadron, 
separate, and reunite ; and the inhabitant of 
the seas, inspired by a breath of existence, 
pursues with bounding movements its mate, 
by the line of fire which is reflected from her 
in the stream." — I. 152, 153. 

Chateaubriand's mind is full not only of the 
images but the sounds which attest the reign 
of animated nature. Equally familiar with 
those of the desert and of the cultivated plain, 
he has had his susceptibility alike open in 
both to the impressions which arise to a pious 
observer from their contemplation. 

"There is a law in nature relative to the 
cries of animals, which has not been sufficient- 
ly observed, and deserves to be so. The dif- 
ferent sounds of the inhabitants of the desert 
are calculated according to the grandeur or 
the sweetness of the scene where they arise, 
and the hour of the day when they are heard. 
The roaring of the lion, loud, rough, and tre- 
mendous, is in unison with the desert scenes 
in which it is heard; while the lowing of the 
oxen diffuses a pleasing calm through our 
valleys. The goat has something trembling 
and savage in its cry, like the rocks and ravines 
from which it loves to suspend itself. The 
war-horse imitates the notes of the trumpet 
that animates him to the charge, and, as if he 
felt that he was not made for degrading em- 
ployments, he is silent under the spur of the 
labourer, and neighs under the rein of the 
warrior. The night, by turns charming or 
sombre, is enlivened by the nightingale or 
saddened by the owl — the one sings for the 
zephyrs, the groves, the moon, the soul of 
lovers — the other for the winds, the forests, the 
darkness, and the dead. Finally, all the ani- 
mals which live on others have a peculiar cry 
by which they may be distinguished by the 
creatures which are destined to be their prey," 
—I. 156. 

The making of birds' nests is one of the 
b3 



18 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



most common objects of observation. Listen 
to the reflections of genius and poetry on this 
beautiful subject. 

" The admirable wisdom of Providence is 
nowhere more conspicuous than in the nests 
of birds. It is impossible to contemplate, with- 
out emotion, the Divine goodness which thus 
gives industry to the weak, and foresight to 
the thoughtless. 

" No sooner have the trees put forth their 
leaves, than a thousand little workmen com- 
mence their labours. Some bring long pieces 
of straw into the hole of an old wall ; others 
affix their edifice to the windows of a church ; 
these steal a hair from the mane of a horse ; 
those bear away, with wings trembling beneath 
its weight, the fragment of wool which a lamb 
has left entangled in the briers. A thousand 
palaces at once arise, and every palace is a 
nest ; within every nest is soon to be seen a 
charming metamorphosis ; first, a beautiful 
egg, then a little one covered with down. The 
little nestling soon feels his wings begin to 
grow ; his mother teaches him to raise himself 
on his bed of repose. Soon he takes courage 
enough to approach the edge of the nest, and 
casts a first look on the works of nature. 
Terrified and enchanted at the sight, he pre- 
cipitates himself amidst his brothers and sisters 
who have never as yet seen that spectacle ; 
but recalled a second time from his couch, the 
young king of the air, who still has the crown 
of infancy on his head, ventures to contemplate 
the boundless heavens, the waving summit 
of the pine-trees, and the vast labyrinth of fo- 
liage which lies beneath his feet. And, at the 
moment that the forests are rejoicing at the 
sight of their new inmate, an aged bird, who 
feels himself abandoned by his wings, quietly 
rests beside a stream; there, resigned and 
solitary, he tranquilly awaits death, on the 
banks of the same river where he sung his 
'first loves, and whose trees still bear his nest 
and his melodious offspring." — I. 158. 

The subject of the migration of the feathered 
tribes furnishes this attentive observer of na- 
ture with many beautiful images. We have 
room only for the following extract: 

"In the first ages of the world, it was by the 
flowering of plants, the fall of the leaves, the 
•departure and the arrival of birds, that the 
labourers and the shepherds regulated their 
labours. Thence has sprung the art of divina- 
tion among certain people; they imagined that 
the birds which were sure to precede certain 
changes of the season or atmosphere, could 
not but be inspired by the Deity. The ancient 
naturalists, and the poets, to whom we are 
indebted for the few remains of simplicity 
which still linger amongst us, show us how 
marvellous was that manner of counting by 
The changes of nature, and what a charm it 
spread over the whole of existence. God is a 
profound secret. Man, created in his image, 
is equally incomprehensible. It was therefore 
an ineffable harmony to see the periods of his 
existence regulated by measures of time as 
harmonious as himself. 

"Beneath the tents of Jacob or of Boaz, the 
arrival of a bird put every thing in movement; 
am Patriarch made the circuit of the camp at 



the head of his followers, armed with scythes. 
If the report was spread, that the young of the 
swallows had been seen wheeling about, the 
whole people joyfully commenced their harvest. 
These beautiful signs, while they directed the 
labours of the present, had the advantage of 
foretelling the vicissitudes of the approaching 
season. If the geese and swans arrived in 
abundance, it was known that the winter 
would be snow. Did the redbreast begin to 
build its nest in January, the shepherds hoped 
in April for the roses of May. The marriage 
of a virgin on the margin of a fountain, was 
represented by the first opening of the bud of 
the rose ; and the death of the aged, who usual- 
ly drop oft" in autumn, by the falling of leaves, 
or the maturity of the harvests. While the 
philosopher, abridging or elongating the year, 
extended the winter over the verdure of spring, 
the peasant felt no alarm that the astronomer, 
who came to him from heaven, would be 
wrong in his calculations. He knew that the 
nightingale would not take the season of hoar 
frost for that of flowers, or make the groves 
resound at the winter solstice with the songs 
of summer. Thus, the cares, the joys, the 
pleasures of the rural life were determined, 
not by the uncertain calendar of the learned, 
but the infallible signs of Him who traced his 
path to the sun. That sovereign regulator 
.v'shed himself that the rites of his worship 
snould be determined by the epochs fixed by 
his works ; and in those days of innocence, 
according to the seasons and the labours they 
required, it was the voice of the zephyr or of 
the tempest, of the eagle or the dove, which 
called the worshipper to the temple of his 
Creator."— I. 171. 

Let no one exclaim, what have these descrip- 
tions to do with the spirit of Christianity 1 
Gray thought otherwise, when he wrote the 
sublime lines on visiting the Grande Char- 
treuse. Buchanan thought otherwise, when, 
in his exquisite Ode to May, he supposed the 
first zephyrs of spring to blow over the islands 
of the just. The work of Chateaubriand, it is 
to be recollected, is not merely an exposition 
of the doctrines, spirit, or precepts of Chris- 
tianity ; it is intended expressly to allure, by 
the charms which it exhibits, the man of the 
world, an unbelieving and volatile generation, 
to the feelings of devotion; it is meant to com- 
bine all that is delightful or lovely in the 
works of nature, with all that is sublime or 
elevating in the revelations of religion. In his 
eloquent pages, therefore, we find united the 
Natural Theology of Paley, the Contemplations 
of Taylor, and the Analogy of Butler ; and 
if the theologians will look in vain for the 
weighty arguments by which the English 
divines have established the foundation of their 
faith, men of ordinary education will find even 
more to entrance and subdue their minds. 

Among the proofs of the immortality of the 
soul, our author, with all others who have 
thought upon the subject, classes the obvious 
disproportion between the desires and capacity 
of the soul, and the limits of its acquisitions 
and enjoyments in this world. In the follow- 
ing passage this argument is placed in its just 
colours. 



CHATEAUBRIAND. 



19 



"If it is impossible to deny, that the hope of 
man continues to the edge of the grave — if it 
be true, that the advantages of this world, so 
far from satisfying our wishes, tend only to 
augment the want which the soul experiences, 
and dig deeper the abyss which it contains 
Within itself, we must conclude that there is 
something beyond the limits of time. 'Vin- 
cula hujus mundi, says St. Augustin, 'asperi- 
tatem habent veram, jucunditatem falsam, 
certum dolorem, incertam voluptatem, durum 
laborem, timidam quietem, rem plenam mise- 
riae, spem beatitudinis inanem.' Far from 
lamenting that the desire for felicity has been 
planted in this world, and its ultimate gratifica- 
tion only in another, let us discern in that 
only an additional proof of the goodness of God. 
Since sooner or later we must quit this world, 
Providence has placed beyond its limits a 
charm, which is felt as an attraction to dimin- 
ish the terrors of the tomb; as a kind mother, 
when wishing to make her infant cross a bar- 
rier, places some agreeable object on the other 
side."— I. 210. 

"Finally, there is another proof of the im- 
mortality of the soul, which has not been suf- 
ficiently insisted on, and that is the universal 
veneration of mankind for the tomb. There, 
by an invincible charm, life is attached to 
death, there the human race declares itself 
superior to the rest of creation, and proclaims 
aloud its lofty destinies. What animal regards 
its coffin, or disquiets itself about the ashes of 
its fathers 1 Which one has any regard for 
the bones of its father, or even knows its 
father, after the first necessities of infancy are 
passed? Whence comes then the all-power- 
ful idea which we entertain of death 1 Do a 
few grains of dust merit so much considera- 
tion ] No ; without doubt we respect the 
bones of our fathers, because an inward voice 
tells us that all is not lost with them; and that 
is the voice which has everywhere conse- 
crated the funeral service throughout the 
world ; all are equally persuaded that the sleep 
is not eternal, even in the tomb, and that death 
itself is but a glorious transfiguration." — I. 217. 

To the objection, that if the idea of God is 
innate, it must appear in children without 
any education, which is not generally the case, 
Chateaubriand replies : 

" God being a spirit, and it being impossible 
that he should be understood but by a spirit, 
an infant, in whom the powers of thought are 
not as yet developed, cannot form a proper 
conception of the Supreme Being. We must 
not expect from the heart its noblest function, 
when the marvellous fabric is as yet in the 
hands of its Creator. 

"Besides, there seems reason to believe 
that a child has, at least, a sort of instinct of 
its Creator; witness only its little reveries, its 
disquietudes, its fears in the night, its disposi- 
tion to raise its eyes to heaven. An infant 
joins together its little hands and repeats after 
its mother a prayer to the good God. Why does 
that little angel lisp with so much love and 
purity the name of the Supreme Being, if it 
has no inward consciousness of its existence 
in its heart] 

"Behold that new-born infant, which the 



nurse still carries under her arms. What has 
it done to give so much joy to that old man, to 
that man in the prime of life, to that woman 1 
Two or three syllables half-formed, which no 
one rightly understands, and instantly three 
reasonable creatures are transported with de- 
light, from the grandfather, to whom all that 
life contains is known, to the young mother, 
to whom the greater part of it is as yet un- 
revealed. Who has put that power into the 
Avord of man ] How does it happen that the 
sound of a human voice subjugates so instan- 
taneously the human heart] What subjugates 
you is something allied to a mystery, which 
depends on causes more elevated than the in- 
terest, how strong soever, which you take in 
that infant: something tells you that these in- 
articulate words are the first openings of an 
immortal soul." — I. 224. 

There is a subject on which human genius 
can hardly dare to touch, the future felicity of 
the just. Our author thus treats this delicate 
subject : 

"The purest of sentiments in this world is 
admiration ; but every earthly admiration is 
mingled with weakness, either in the object it 
admires, or in that admiring. Imagine, then, 
a perfect being, which perceives at once all 
that is, and has, and will be ; suppose that soul 
exempt from envy and all the weaknesses of 
life, incorruptible, indefatigable, unalterable ; 
conceive it contemplating without ceasing the 
Most High, discovering incessantly new per- 
fections ; feeling existence only from the re- 
newed sentiment of that admiration ; conceive 
God as the sovereign beauty, the universal 
principle of love; figure all the attachments 
of earth blending in that abyss of feeling, 
without ceasing to love the objects of affection 
on this earth; imagine, finally, that the inmate 
of heaven has the conviction that this felicity 
is never to end, and you will have an idea, 
feeble and imperfect indeed, of the felicity of 
the just. They are plunged in this abyss of 
delight, as in an ocean from which they can- 
not emerge: they wish nothing; they have 
every thing, though desiring nothing; an 
eternal youth, a felicity without end; a glory 
divine is expressed in their countenances ; a 
sweet, noble, and majestic joy; it is a sublime 
feeling of truth and virtue which transports 
them ; at every instant they experience the 
same rapture as a mother who regains a be- 
loved child whom she believed lost; and that 
exquisite joy, too fleeting on earth, is there 
prolonged through the ages of eternity. — I. 241. 

We intended to have gone through in this 
paper the whole Genie de Christianisme, and 
we have only concluded the first volume, so 
prolific of beauty are its pages. We make no 
apology for the length of the quotations, which 
have so much extended the limits of this article ; 
any observations would be inexcusable which 
should abridge passages of such transcendent 
beauty. 

"The Itineraire de Paris a. Jerusalem," is 
an account of the author's journey in 1806, 
from Paris to Greece, Constantinople, Pales- 
tine, Egypt and Carthage. This work is not 
so much a book of travels as memoirs of the 
feelings and impressions of the author during 



20 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



a journey over tne shores of the Mediterranean; 
the cradle, as Dr. Johnson observed, of all that 
dignifies and has blest human nature, of our 
laws, our religion, and our civilization. It 
may readily be anticipated that the observa- 
tions of such a man, in such scenes, must con- 
tain much that is interesting and delightful: 
our readers may prepare themselves for a high 
gratification ; it is seldom that they have such 
an intellectual feast laid before them. We 
have translated the passages, both because 
there is no English version with which we are 
acquainted of this work, and because the trans- 
lations which usually appear of French authors 
are executed in so slovenly a style. 

On his first night amidst the ruins of Sparta, 
our author gives the following interesting ac- 
count : — 

" After supper Joseph brought me my saddle, 
which usually served for my pillow. I wrap- 
ped myself in my cloak, and slept on the banks 
of the Eurotas under a laurel. The night was 
so clear and serene, that the milky way formed 
a resplendent arch, reflected in the Avaters of 
the river, and by the light of which I could 
read. I slept with my eyes turned towards the 
heavens, and with the constellation of the 
Swan of Leda directly above my head. Even 
at this distance of time I recollect the pleasure 
I experienced in sleeping thus in the woods 
of America, and still more in awakening in 
the middle of the night. I there heard the 
sound of the wind rustling through those pro- 
found solitudes, the cry of the stag and the 
deer, the fall of a distant cataract, while the 
fire at my feet, half-extinguished, reddened 
from below the foliage of the forest. I even 
experienced a pleasure from the voice of the 
Iroquois, when he uttered his cry in the midst 
of the untrodden woods, and by the light of 
the stars, amidst the silence of nature, pro- 
claimed his unfettered freedom. Emotions such 
as these please at twenty years of age, because 
life is then so full of vigour that it suffices as 
it were for itself, and because there is some- 
thing in early youth which incessantly urges 
towards the mysterious and the unknown ; 
ipsi sibi somnia fingunt ; but in a more mature 
age the mind reverts to more imperishable 
emotions; it inclines, most of all, to there- 
collections and the examples of history. I would 
still sleep willingly on the banks of the Eurotas 
and the Jordan, if the shades of the three hun- 
dred Spartans, or of the twelve sons of Jacob, 
were to visit my dreams ; but I would no longer 
set out to visit lands which have never been 
explored by the plough. I now feel the desire 
for those old deserts which shroud the walls 
of Babylon or the legions of Pharsalia; fields 
of which the furrows are engraven on human 
thought, and where I may find man as I am, 
the blood, the tears, and the labours of man." 
—I. 86, 87. 

From Laconia our author directed his steps 
by the isthmus of Corinth to Athens. Of his 
first feelings in the ancient cradle of taste and 
genius he gives the following beautiful de- 
scription: — 

" Overwhelmed with fatigue, I slept for some 
time without interruption, when I was at length 
awakened by the sound of Turkish music, 



proceeding from the summits of the Propyleum. 
At the same moment a Mussulman priest from 
one of the mosques called the faithful to pray 
in the city of Minerva. I cannot describe 
what I felt at the sound ; that Iman had no 
need to remind one of the lapse of time ; his 
voice alone in these scenes announced the 
revolution of ages. 

" This fluctuation in human affairs is the 
more remarkable from the contrast which it 
affords to the unchangeableness of nature. As 
if to insult the instability of human affairs, the 
animals and the birds experience no change 
in their empires, nor alterations in their habits. 
I saw, when sitting on the hill of the Muses, 
the storks form themselves into a w T edge, and 
wing their flight towards the shores of Africa. 
For two thousand years they have made the 
same voyage — they have remained free and 
happy in the city of Solon, as in that of the 
chief of the black eunuchs. From the height 
of their nests, which the revolutions below 
have not been able to reach, they have seen 
the races of men disappear; while impious 
generations have arisen on the tombs of their 
religious parents, the young stork has never 
ceased to nourish its aged parent. I involun- 
tarily fell into these reflections, for the stork 
is the friend of the traveller: 'it knows the 
seasons of heaven.' These birds were fre- 
quently my companions in the solitudes of 
America : I have often seen them perched on 
the wigwams of the savage ; and when I saw 
them rise from another species of desert, from 
the ruins of the Parthenon, I could not avoid 
feelingacompanion in thedesolation of empires. 

" The first thing which strikes a traveller 
in the monuments of Athens, is their lovely 
colour. In our climate, where the heavens 
are charged with smoke and rain, the whitest 
stone soon becomes tinged with black and 
green. It is not thus with the atmosphere of 
the city of Theseus. The clear sky and bril- 
liant sun of Greece have shed over the marble 
of Paros and Pentilicus a golden hue, com- 
parable only to the finest and most fleeting 
tints of autumn. 

" Before I saw these splendid remains I had 
fallen into the ordinary error concerning them. 
I conceived they were perfect in their details, 
but that they wanted grandeur. But the first 
glance at the originals is sufficient to show 
that the genius of the architects has supplied 
in the magnitude of proportion what was 
wanting in size; and Athens is accordingly 
filled with stupendous edifices. The Athenians, 
a people far from rich, few in number, have 
succeeded in moving gigantic masses ; the 
blocks of stone in the Pnyx and the Propyleum 
are literally quarters of rock. The slabs which 
stretch from pillar to pillar are of enormous 
dimensions : the columns of the Temple of 
Jupiter Olympius are above sixty feet in height, 
and the walls of Athens, including those winch 
stretched to the Pira?us, extended over nine 
leagues, and were so broad that two chariots 
could drive on them abreast. The Romans 
never erected more extensive fortifications. 

" By what strange fatality has it happened 
that the chefs d'eeuvre of antiquity, which the 
moderns go so far to admire, have owed their 



CHATEAUBRIAND. 



21 



destruction chiefly to the moderns themselves ? 
The Parthenon was entire in 1687; the Chris- 
tians at first converted it into a church, and the 
Turks into a mosque. The Venetians, in the 
middle of the light of the seventeenth century, 
bombarded the Acropolis with red-hot shot ; a 
shell fell on the Parthenon, pierced the roof, 
communicated to a few barrels of powder, and 
blew into the air great part of the edifice, 
which did less honour to the gods of antiquity 
than the genius of man. No sooner was the 
town captured, than Morosini, in the design 
of embellishing Venice with its spoils, took 
down the statues from the front of the Temple ; 
and another modern has completed, from love 
for the arts, that which the Venetian had begun. 
The invention of fire-arms has been fatal to 
the monuments of antiquity. Had the bar- 
barians been acquainted with the use of gun- 
powder, not a Greek or Roman edifice would 
have survived their invasion; they would 
have blown up even the Pyramids in the 
search for hidden treasures. One year of war 
in our times will destroy more than a century 
of combats among the ancients. Every thing 
among the moderns seems opposed to the per- 
fection of art; their country, their mannersaheir 
dress; even their discoveries." — 1. 136, 145. 

These observations are perfectly well found- 
ed. No one can have visited the Grecian monu- 
ments on the shores of the Mediterranean, 
without perceiving that they were thoroughly 
masters of an element of grandeur, hitherto 
but little understood among the moderns, that 
arising from gigantic masses of stone. The 
feeling of sublimity which they produce is in- 
describable : it equals that of Gothic edifices 
of a thousand times the size. Every traveller 
must have felt this upon looking at the im- 
mense masses which rise in solitary magnifi- 
cence on the plains at Stonehenge. The great 
block in the tomb of Agamemnon at Argos ; 
those in the Cyclopean Walls of Volterra, and 
in the ruins of Agrigentum in Sicily, strike 
the beholder with a degree of astonishment 
bordering on awe. To have moved such 
enormous masses seems the work of a race 
of mortals superior in thought and power 
to this degenerate age; it is impossible, in 
visiting them, to avoid the feeling that you 
are beholding the work of giants. It is to this 
cause, we are persuaded, that the extraordina- 
ry impression produced by the pyramids, and 
all the works of the Cyclopean age in archi- 
tecture, is to be ascribed ; and as it is an 
element of sublimity within the reach of all 
who have considerable funds at their com- 
mand, it is earnestly to be hoped that it will 
not be overlooked by our architects. Strange 
that so powerful an ingredient in the sublime 
should have been lost sight of in proportion to 
the ability of the age to produce it, and that the 
monuments raised in the infancy of the 
mechanical art, should still be those in which 
alone it is to be seen to perfection ! 

We willingly translate the description of the 
unrivalled scene viewed from the Acropolis 
by the same poetical hand ; a description so 
glowing, and yet so true, that it almost recalls, 
after the lapse of years, the fading tints of the 
original on the memory. 



"To understand the view from the Acropolis, 
you must figure to yourself all the plain at its 
foot; bare and clothed in a dusky heath, inter- 
sected here and there by woods of olives, 
squares of barley, and ridges of vines ; you 
must conceive the heads of columns, and the 
ends of ancient ruins, emerging from the midst 
of that cultivation ; Albanian women washing 
their clothes at the fountain or the scanty 
streams ; peasants leading their asses, laden 
with provisions, into the modern city : those 
ruins so celebrated, those isles, those seas, 
whose names are engraven on the memory, 
illumined by a resplendent light. I have seen 
from the rock of the Acropolis the sun rise 
between the two summits of Mount Hymettus : 
the ravens, which nestle round the citadel, but 
never fly over its summit, floating in the air 
beneath, their glossy wings reflecting the rosy 
tints of the morning: columns of light smoke 
ascending from the villages on the sides of the 
neighbouring mountains marked the colonies 
of bees on the far-famed Hymettus ; and the 
ruins of the Parthenon were illuminated by 
the finest tints of pink and violet. The sculp- 
tures of Phidias, struck by a horizontal ray of 
gold, seemed to start from their marbled bed 
by the depth and mobility of their shadows : 
in the distance, the sea and the Piraeus were 
resplendent with light, while on the verge of 
the western horizon, the citadel of Corinth, 
glittering in the rays of the rising sun, shone 
like a rock of purple and fire." — I. 149. 

These are the colours of poetry; but beside 
this brilliant passage of French description, 
we willingly place the equally correct and still 
more thrilling lines of our own poet. 

" Slow sinks more beauteous ere his race be run 

Alone Morea's hills the setting sun, 

Not as in northern clime obscurely bright, 

But one unclouded blaze of living light; 

O'er the hushed deep the yellow beams he throws, 

Gilds the <?reen wave that Irembles as it glows; 

On old iEsrina's rock and Idra's isle, 

The God of Gladness sheds his parting smile ; 

O'er his own regions lingering loves to shine, 

Though there his altars are no more divine ; 

Descending fast, the mountain shadows kiss 

Thy glorious gulf, unconquer'd Salamis! 

Their azure arches through the long expanse. 

More deeplv purpled meet his mellowing glance, 

And tenderest tints, along their summits driven, 

Mark his gay course and own the hues of heaven, 

Till, darklv shaded from the land and deep, 

Behind his Delphian cliff he sinks to sleep." 

The columns of the temple of Jupiter Olym- 
pius produced the same effects on the enthu- 
siastic mind of Chateaubriand as they do on 
every traveller: — But he has added some re- 
flections highly descriptive of the peculiar turn 
of his mind. 

" At length we came to the great isolated 
columns placed in the quarter which is called 
the city of Adrian. On a portion of the archi- 
trave which unites two of the columns, is to 
be seen a piece of masonry, once the abode of 
a hermit. It is impossible to conceive how 
that building, which is still entire, could have 
been erected on the summit of one of these 
prodigious columns, whose height is above 
sixty feet. Thus this vast temple, at which 
the Athenians toiled for seven centuries, which 
all the kings of Asia laboured to finish, which 
Adrian, the ruler of the world, had first the 
glory to complete, has sunk under the hand of 



22 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



time, and the cell of a hermit has remained 
undecayed on its ruins. A miserable cabin is 
borne aloft on two columns of marble, as if 
fortune had wished to exhibit, on that magni- 
ficent pedestal, a monument of its triumph and 
its caprice. 

"These columns, though twenty feet higher 
than those of the Parthenon, are far from pos- 
sessing their beauty. The degeneracy of taste 
is apparent in their construction ; but isolated 
and dispersed as they are, on a naked and 
desert plain, their effect is imposing in the 
highest degree. I stopped at their feet to hear 
the wind whistle through the Corinthian foliage 
on their summits : like the solitary palms 
which rise here and there amidst the ruins of 
Alexandria. When the Turks are threatened 
by any calamity, they bring a lamb into this 
place, and constrain jt to bleat, with its face 
turned to heaven. Being unable to find the 
voice of innocence among men, they have re- 
course to the new-born lamb to mitigate the 
anger of heaven." — I. 152, 153. 

He followed the footsteps of Chandler along 
the Long Walls to the Piraeus, and found that 
profound solitude in that once busy and ani- 
mated scene, which is felt to be so impressive 
by every traveller. 

"If Chandler was astonished at the solitude 
of the Piraius, I can safely assert that I was 
not less astonished than he. We had made 
the circuit of that desert shore ; three harbours 
had met our eyes, and in all that space we had 
not seen a single vessel ! The only spectacle 
to be seen was the ruins and the rocks on the 
shore — the only sounds that could be heard 
were the cry of the seafowl, and the murmur 
of the wave, which, breaking on the tomb of 
Themistocles, drew forth a perpetual sigh from 
the abode of eternal silence. Borne away by 
the sea, the ashes of the conqueror of Xerxes 
repose beneath the waves, side by side with 
the bones of the Persians. In vain I sought 
the Temple of Venus, the long gallery, and 
the symbolical statue which represented the 
Athenian people; the image of that implacable 
democracy was for ever fallen, beside the 
walls, where the exiled citizens came to im- 
plore a return to their country. Instead of 
those superb arsenals, of those Agorae resound- 
ing with the voice of the sailors ; of those 
edifices which rivalled the beauty of the city 
of Rhodes, I saw nothing but a ruined convent 
and a solitary magazine. A single Turkish 
sentinel is perpetually seated on the coast; 
months and years revolve without a bark pre- 
senting itself to his sight. Such is the deplora- 
ble state into which these ports, once so 
famous, have now fallen — Who have over- 
turned so many monuments of gods and men? 
The hidden power which overthrows every 
thing, and is itself subject to the Unknown 
God whose altar St. Paul beheld at Phalera." 
—I. 157. 158. 

The fruitful theme of the decay of Greece 
has called forth many of the finest apostrophes 
of our moralists and poets. On this subject 
Chateaubriand offers the following striking 
observations : — 

" One would imagine that Greece itself an- 
nounced, by its mourning, the misfortunes of 



its children. In general, the country is uncul- 
tivated, the soil bare, rough, savage, of a brown 
and withered aspect. There are no rivers, 
properly so called, but little streams and tor- 
rents, which become dry in summer. No 
farm-houses are to be seen on the farms, no 
labourers, no chariots, no oxen, or horses of 
agriculture. Nothing can be figured so melan- 
choly as to see the track of a modern wheel, 
where you can still trace in the worn parts of 
the rock the track of ancient wheels. Coast 
along that shore, bordered by a sea hardly 
more desolate — place on the summit of a rock 
a ruined tower, an abandoned convent — figure 
a minaret rising up in the midst of the solitude 
as a badge of slavery — a solitary flock feeding 
on a cape, surmounted by ruined columns — 
the turban of a Turk scaring the few goats 
which browze on the hills, and you will obtain 
a just idea of modern Greece. 

" On the eve of leaving Greece, at the Cape 
of Sunium, I did not abandon myself alone to 
the romantic ideas which the beauty of the 
scene was fitted to inspire. I retraced in nly 
mind the history of that country; I strove to 
discover in the ancient prosperity of Athens 
and Sparta the cause of their present misfor- 
tunes, and in their present situation the germ 
of future glory.- The breaking of the sea, 
which insensibly increased against the rocks 
at the foot of the Cape, at length reminded me 
that the wind had risen, and that it was time 
to resume my voyage. We descended to the 
vessel, and found the sailors already prepared 
for our departure. We pushed out to sea, 
and the breeze, which blew fresh from the land, 
bore us rapidly towards Zea. As we receded 
from the shore, the columns of Sunium rose 
more beautiful above the waves : their pure 
white appeared well defined in the dark azure 
of the distant sky. We were already far from 
the Cape ; but we still heard the murmur of 
the waves, which broke on the cliffs at its foot, 
the whistle of the winds through its solitary 
pillars, and the cry of the sea-birds which wheel 
round the stormy promontory : they were the 
last sounds which I heard on the shores of 
Greece."— 1. 196. 

" The Greeks did not excel less in the choice 
of the site of their edifices than in the forms 
and proportions. The greater part of the pro- 
montories of Peloponnesus, Attica, and Ionia, 
and the Islands of the Archipelago, are marked 
by temples, trophies, or tombs. These monu- 
ments, surrounded as they generally are with 
woods and rocks, beheld in all the changes of 
light and shadow, sometimes in the midst of 
clouds and lightning, sometimes by the light 
of the moon, sometimes gilded by the rising 
sun, sometimes flaming in his setting beams, 
throw an indescribable charm over the shores 
of Greece. The earth, thus decorated, re- 
sembles the old Cybele, who, crowned and 
seated on the shore, commanded her son 
Neptune to spread the waves beneath her 
feet. 

" Christianity, to which we owe the sole 
architecture in unison with our manners, has 
also taught how to place our true monuments : 
our chapels, our abbeys, our monasteries, are 
dispersed on the summits of hills — not that the 



CHATEAUBRIAND. 



23 



choice of the site was always the work of the 
architect, but that an art which is in unison 
with the feelings of the people, seldom errs far 
in what is really beautiful. Observe, on the 
other hand, how wretchedly almost all our 
edifices copied from the antique are placed. 
Not one of the heights around Paris is orna- 
mented with any of the splendid edifices with 
which the city is filled. The modern Greek 
edifices resemble the corrupted language which 
they speak at Sparta and Athens ; it is in vain 
to maintain that it is the language of Homer 
and Plato; a mixture of uncouth words, and 
of foreign constructions, betrays at every in- 
stant the invasion of the barbarians. 

"To the loveliest sunset in nature, suc- 
ceeded a serene night. The firmament, re- 
flected in the waves, seemed to sleep in the 
midst of the sea. The evening star, my faith- 
ful companion in my journey, was ready to 
sink beneath the horizon; its place could only 
be distinguished by the rays of light which it 
occasionally shed upon the water, like a dying 
taper in the distance. At intervals, the per- 
fumed breeze from the islands which we pass- 
ed entranced the senses, and agitated on the 
surface of the ocean the glassy image of the 
heavens."— I. 182, 183. 

The appearance of morning in the sea of 
Marmora is described in not less glowing 
colours. 

" At four in the morning we weighed an- 
chor, and as the wind was fair, we found our- 
selves in less than an hour at the extremity of 
the waters of the river. The scene was worthy 
of being described. On the right, Aurora rose 
above the headlands of Asia; on the left, was 
extended the sea of Marmora; the heavens in 
the east were of a fiery red, which grew paler 
in proportion as the morning advanced; the 
morning star still shone in that empurpled 
light; and above it you could barely descry 
the pale circle of the moon. The picture 
changed while I still contemplated it; soon a 
blended glory of rays of rose and gold, diverg- 
ing from a common centre, mounted to the 
zenith; these columns were effaced, revived, 
and effaced anew, until the yim rose above the 
horizon, and confounded all the lesser shades 
in one universal blaze of light." — I. 236. 

His journey into the Holy Land awakened 
a new and not less interesting train of ideas, 
throughout the whole of which we recognise 
the peculiar features of M. de Chateaubriand's 
mind : a strong and poetical sense of the 
beauties of nature, a memory fraught with 
historical recollections; a deep sense of reli- 
gion, illustrated, however, rather as it affects 
the imagination and the passions, than the 
judgment. It is a mere chimera to suppose 
that such aids are to be rejected by the friends 
of Christianity, or that truth may with safety 
discard the aid of fancy, either in subduing 
the passions or affecting the heart. On the 
contrary, every day's experience must con- 
vince us, that for one who can understand an 
argument, hundreds can enjoy a romance; 
and that truth, to affect multitudes, must con- 
descend to wear the garb of fancy. It is no 
doubt of vast importance that works should 
exist in which the truths of religion are un- 



folded with lucid precision, and its principles 
defined with the force of reason: but it is at 
least of equal moment, that others should be 
found in which the graces of eloquence and 
the fervour of enthusiasm form an attraction to 
those who are insensible to graver considera- 
tions ; where the reader is tempted to follow a 
path which he finds only strewed with flowers, 
and he unconsciously inhales the breath of 
eternal life. 

Oosi all Egro fanciul porgiamo aspersi 
I)i so.ive licor gli orsi del vaso, 
Succhi amari ingannato intanto ei beve, 
£ dal inganno sua vita riceve. 

"On nearing the coast of Judea, the first 
visitors we received were three swallows. 
They were perhaps on their way from France, 
and pursuing their course to Syria. I was 
strongly tempted to ask them what news they 
brought from that paternal roof which I had so 
long quitted. I recollect that in years of in- 
fancy, I spent entire hours in watching with 
an indescribable pleasure the course of swal- 
lows in autumn, when assembling in crowds 
previous to their annual migration : a secret 
instinct told me that I too should be a travel- 
ler. They assembled in the end of autumn 
around a great fishpond ; there, amidst a thou- 
sand evolutions and nights in air, they seemed 
to try their wings, and prepare for their long 
pilgrimage. Whence is it that of all the re- 
collections in existence, we prefer those which 
are connected with our cradle 1 The illusions 
of self-love, the pleasures of youth, do not 
recur with the same charm to the memory ; 
we find in them, on the contrary, frequent bit- 
terness and pain ; but the slightest circum- 
stances revive in the heart the recollections 
of infancy, and always with a fresh charm. 
On the shores of the iakes in America, in an 
unknown desert, which was sublime only from 
the efleci of solitude, a swallow has frequently 
recalled to my recollection the first years of 
my life ; as here on the coast of Syria they 
recalled them in sight of an ancient land re- 
sounding with the traditions of history and the 
voice of ages. 

" The air was so fresh and so balmy that 
all the passengers remained on deck during 
the night. At six in the morning I was awa- 
kened by a confused hum ; I opened my eyes, 
and saw all the pilgrims crowding towards 
the prow of the vessel. I asked what it was ? 
they all replied, ' Signor, il Carmelo.' I in- 
stantly rose from the plank on which I was 
stretched, and eagerly looked out for the sacred 
mountain. Every one strove to show it to me, 
but I could see nothing by reason of the daz- 
zling of the sun, which now rose above the 
horizon. The moment had something in it 
that was august and impressive; all the pil- 
grims, with their chaplets in their hands, 
remained in silence, watching for the appear- 
ance of the Holy Land ; the captain prayed 
aloud, and not a sound was to be heard but 
that prayer and the rush of the vessel, as it 
ploughed with a fair wind through the azure 
sea. From time to time the cry arose, fiom 
those in elevated parts of the vessel, that they 
saw Mount Carmel, and at length I myself 
perceived it like a round globe under the raya 



24 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



of the sun. I then fell on my knees, after the 
manner of the Latin pilgrims. My first im- 
pression was not the kind of agitation which 
I experienced on approaching the coast of 
Greece, but the sight of the cradle of the Israel- 
ites, and of the country of Christ, filled me 
with awe and veneration. I was about to 
descend on the land of miracles — on the birth- 
place of the sublimest poetry that has ever 
appeared on earth — on the spot where, speak- 
ing only as it has affected human history, the 
most wonderful event has occurred which 
ever changed the destinies of the species. I 
was about to visit the scenes which had been 
seen before me by Godfrey of Bouillon, Ray- 
mond of Toulouse, Tancred the Brave, Richard 
Cceur de Lion, and Saint Louis, whose virtues 
even the infidels respected. How could an 
obscure pilgrim like myself dare to tread a 
soil ennobled by such recollections !" — I. 263 
—265. 

Nothing is more striking in the whole work 
than the description of the Dead Sea, and the 
Valley of Jordan. He has contrived to bring 
the features of that extraordinary scene more 
completely before us than any of the numerous 
English travellers who have preceded or fol- 
lowed him on the same route. 

"We quitted the convent at three in the 
afternoon, ascended the torrent of Cedron, and 
at length, crossing the ravine, rejoined our 
route to the east. An opening in the mountain 
gave us a passing view of Jerusalem. I 
hardly recognised the city; it seemed a mass 
of broken rocks ; the sudden appearance of 
that city of desolation in the midst of the wil- 
derness had something in it almost terrifying. 
She was, in truth, the Queen of the Desert. 

"As we advanced, the aspect of the moun- 
tains continued constantly the same, that is, a 
powdery white — without shade, a tree, or even 
moss. At half past four, we descended from 
the lofty chain we had hitherto traversed, and 
wound along another of inferior elevation. At 
length we arrived at the last of the chain of 
heights, which close in on the west the Valley 
of Jordan and the Dead Sea. The sun was 
nearly setting ; we dismounted from our 
hoises, and I lay down to contemplate at lei- 
sure the lake, the valley, and the river. 

" When you speak in general of a valley, 
you conceive it either cultivated or unculti- 
vated; if the former, it is filled with villages, 
corn-fields, vineyards, and flocks; if the latter, 
it presents grass or forests ; if it is watered by 
a river, that river has windings, and the sinu- 
osities or projecting points afford agreeable 
and varied landscapes. But here there is no- 
thing of the kind. Conceive two long chains 
of mountains running parallel from north to 
south, without projections, without recesses, 
without vegetation. The ridge on the east, 
called the Mountains of Arabia, is the most 
elevated; viewed at the distance of eight or 
ten leagues, it resembles a vast wall, extremely 
similar to the Jura, as seen from the Lake of 
Geneva, from its form and azure tint. You 
can perceive neither summits nor the smallest 
peaks ; only here and there slight inequalities, 
as if the hand of the painter who traced the long 
liues on the sky had occasionally trembled. 



" The chain on the eastern side forms part 
of the mountains of Judea — less elevated and 
more uneven than the ridge on the west: it 
differs also in its character; it exhibits great 
masses of rock and sand, which occasionally 
present all the varieties of ruined fortifications, 
armed men, and floating banners. On the 
side of Arabia, on the other hand, black rocks, 
with perpendicular flanks, spread from afar 
their shadows over the waters of the Dead 
Sea. The smallest bird could not find in those 
crevices of rock a morsel of food ; every thing 
announces a country which has fallen under 
the divine wrath ; every thing inspires the 
horror at the incest from whence sprung Am- 
nion and Moab. 

" The valley which lies between these moun- 
tains resembles the bottom of a sea, from 
which the waves have long ago withdrawn : 
banks of gravel, a dried bottom — rocks covered 
with salt, deserts of moving sand — here and 
there stunted arbutus shrubs grow with diffi- 
culty on that arid soil ; their leaves are co- 
vered with the salt which had nourished their 
roots, while their bark has the scent and taste 
of smoke. Instead of villages, nothing but the 
ruins of towers are to be seen. Through the 
midst of the valley flows a discoloured stream, 
which seems to drag its lazy course unwill- 
ingly towards the lake. Its course is not to 
be discerned by the water, but by the willows 
and shrubs which skirt its banks — the Arab 
conceals himself in these thickets to waylay 
and rob the pilgrim. 

" Such are the places rendered famous by 
the maledictions of Heaven: that river is the 
Jordan : that lake is the Dead Sea. It appears 
with a serene surface; but the guilty cities 
which are embosomed in its waves have poi- 
soned its waters. Its solitary abysses can 
sustain the life of no living thing; no vessel 
ever ploughed its bosom; — its shores are with- 
out trees, without birds, without verdure ; its 
water, frightfully salt, is so heavy that the 
highest wind can hardly raise it. 

" In travelling in Judea, an extreme feeling 
of ennui frequently seizes the mind, from the 
sterile and monotonous aspect of the objects 
which are presented to the eye : but when 
journeying on through these pathless deserts, 
the expanse seems to spread out to infinity 
before you, the ennui disappears, and a secret 
terror is experienced, which, far from lower- 
ing the soul, elevates and inflames the 
genius. These extraordinary scenes reveal 
the land desolated by miracles; — that burning 
sun, the impetuous eagle, the barren fig-tree; 
all the poetry, all the pictures of Scripture are 
there. Every name recalls a mystery ; every 
grotto speaks of the life to come ; every peak 
re-echoes the voice of a prophet. God him- 
self has spoken on these shores: these dried- 
up torrents, these cleft rocks, these tombs rent 
asunder, attest his resistless hand : the desert 
appears mute with terror; and you feel that it 
has never ventured to break silence since it 
heard the voice of the Eternal." — I. 317. 

" I employed two complete hours in wan- 
dering on the shores of the Dead Sea, notwith- 
standing the remonstrances of the Bedouins, 
who pressed me to quit that dangerous region. 



CHATEAUBRIAND. 



25 



I was desirous of seeing the Jordan, at the 
place where it discharges itself into the lake; 
but the Arabs refused to lead me thither, be- 
cause the river, at a league from its mouth, 
makes a detour to the left, and approaches the 
mountains of Arabia. It was necessary, there- 
fore, to direct our steps towards the curve 
which was nearest us. We struck our tents, 
and travelled for an hour and a half with ex- 
cessive difficulty, through a fine and silvery 
sand. We were moving towards a little wood 
of willows and tamarinds; which, to my great 
surprise, I perceived growing in the midst of 
the desert. All of a sudden the Bethlemites 
stopped, and pointed to something at the bottom 
of a ravine, Avhich had not yet attracted my at- 
tention. Without being able to say what it 
was, I perceived a sort of sand rolling on 
through the fixed banks which surrounded it. 
I approached it, and saw a yellow stream 
which could hardly be distinguished from the 
sand of its two banks. Ii was deeply furrowed 
through the rocks, and with difficulty rolled 
on, a stream surcharged with sand : it was the 
Jordan. 

"I had seen the great rivers of America, 
with the pleasure which is inspired by the 
magnificent works of nature. I had hailed 
the Tiber with ardour, and sought with the 
same interest the Eurotas and the Cephisus ; 
but on none of these occasions did I expe- 
rience the intense emotion which I felt on ap- 
proaching the Jordan. Not only did that river 
recall the earliest antiquity, and a name ren- 
dered immortal in the finest poetry, but its 
banks were the theatre of the miracles of our 
religion. Judea is the only country which 
recalls at once the earliest recollections of 
man, and our first impressions of heaven ; 
and thence arises a mixture of feeling in the 
mind, which no other part of the world can 
produce."— I. 327, 328. 

The peculiar turn of his mind renders our 
author, in an especial manner, partial to the 
description of sad and solitary scenes. The 
following description of the Valley of Jehosha- 
phat is in his best style. 

"The Valley of Jehoshaphat has in all ages 
served as the burying-place to Jerusalem : you 
meet there, side by side, monuments of the 
most distant times and of the present century. 
The Jews still come there to die, from all the 
corners of the earth. A stranger sells to them, 
for almost its weight in gold, the land which 
contains the bones of their fathers. Solomon 
planted that valley: the shadow of the Temple 
by which it was overhung — the torrent, called 
after grief, which traversed it — the Psalms 
which David there composed — the Lamenta- 
tions of Jeremiah, which its rocks re-echoed, 
render it the fitting abode of the tomb. Jesus 
Christ commenced his Passion in the same 
place : that innocent David there shed, for the 
expiation of our sins, those tears which the 
guilty David let fall for his own transgressions. 
Few names awaken in our minds recollections 
so solemn as the Valley of Jehoshaphat. It is 
so full of mysteries, that, according to the 
Prophet Joel, all mankind will be assembled 
there before the Eternal Judge. 

"The aspect of this celebrated valley is 



desolate ; the western side is bounded by a 
ridge of lofty rocks which support the walls 
of Jerusalem, above which the towers of the 
city appear. The eastern is formed by the 
Mount of Olives, and another eminence called 
the Mount of Scandal, from the idolatry of 
Solomon. These two mountains, which adjoin 
each other, are almost bare, and of a red and 
sombre hue ; on their desert side you see here 
and there some black and withered vineyards, 
some wild olives, some ploughed land, covered 
with hyssop, and a few ruined chapels. At 
the bottom of the valley, you perceive a tor- 
rent, traversed by a single arch, which appears 
of great antiquity. The stones of the Jewish 
cemetery appear like a mass of ruins at the 
foot of the mountain of Scandal, under the 
village of Siloam. You can hardly distin- 
guish the buildings of the village from the 
ruins with which they are surrounded. Three 
ancient monuments are particularly conspicu- 
ous: those of Zachariah, Josaphat, and Ab- 
salom. The sadness of Jerusalem, from which 
no smoke ascends, and in which no sound is 
to be heard ; the solitude of the surrounding 
mountains, where not a living creature is to 
be seen ; the disorder of those tombs, ruined, 
ransacked, and half-exposed to view, would 
almost induce one to believe that the last 
trump had been heard, and that the dead were 
about to rise in the Valley of Jehoshaphat." — 
II. 34, 35. 

Chateaubriand, after visiting with the devo- 
tion of a pilgrim the Holy Sepulchre, and all 
the scenes of our Saviour's sufferings, spent a 
day in examining the scenes of the Crusaders' 
triumphs, and comparing the descriptions in 
Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered with the places 
where the events which they recorded actually 
occurred. He found them in general so ex- 
tremely exact, that it was difficult to avoid the 
conviction that the poet had been on the spot. 
He even fancied he discovered the scene of 
the Flight of Erminia, and the inimitable com- 
bat and death of Clorinda. 

From the Holy Land, he sailed to Egypt; 
and we have the following graphic picture of 
the approach to that cradle of art and civili- 
zation. 

" On the 20th October, at five in the morn- 
ing, I perceived on the green and ruffled sur- 
face of" the water a line of foam, and beyond it 
a pale and still ocean. The captain clapped 
me on the shoulder, and said in French, ' Nilo ;' 
and soon we entered and glided through those 
celebrated waters. A few palm-trees and a 
minaret announce the situation of Rosetta, but 
the town itself is invisible. These shores re- 
semble those of the coast of Florida ; they are 
totally different from those of Italy or Greece, 
every thing recalls the tropical regions. 

"At ten o'clock we at length discovered, 
beneath the palm-trees, a line of sand which 
extended westward to the promontory of 
Aboukir, before which we were obliged to 
pass before arriving opposite to Alexandria. 
At five in the evening, the shore suddenly 
changed its aspect. The palm-trees seemed 
planted in lines along the shore, like the elms 
along the roads in France. Nature appears to 
take a pleasure in thus recalling the ideas of 
C 



26 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



civilization in a country where that civiliza- 
tion first arose, and barbarity has now resumed 
its sway. It was eleven o'clock when we cast 
anchor before the city, and as it was some 
time before we could get ashore, I had full 
leisure to follow out the contemplation which 
the scene awakened. 

"I saw on my right several vessels, and the 
castle, which stands on the site of the Tower 
of Pharos. On my left, the horizon seemed 
shut in by sand-hills, rums, and obelisks ; im- 
mediately in front, extended a long wall, with 
a few houses appearing above it ; not a light 
was to be seen on shore, and not a sound came 
from the city. This, nevertheless, was Alex- 
andria, the rival of Memphis and Thebes, 
which once contained three millions of inhabit- 
ants, which was the sanctuary of the Muses, 
and the abode of science amidst a benighted 
world. Here were heard the orgies of Antony 
and Cleopatra, and here was Cassar received 
with more than regal splendour by the Queen 
of the East. But in vain I listened. A fatal 
talisman had plunged the people into a hope- 
less calm : that talisman is the despotism 
which extinguishes every joy, which stifles 
even the cry of suffering. And what sound 
could arise in a city of which at least a third 
is abandoned ; another third of which is sur- 
rounded only by the tombs of its former in- 
habitants; and of which the third, which still 
survives between those dead extremities, is a 
species of breathing trunk, destitute of the 
force even to shake off its chains in the middle 
between ruins and the tomb?" — II. 1G3. 

It is to be regretted that Chateaubriand did 
not visit Upper Egypt. His ardent and learned 
mind would have found ample room for elo- 
quent declamation, amidst the gigantic ruins 
of Luxor, and the Sphynx avenues of Thebes. 
The inundation of the Nile, however, pre- 
vented him from seeing even the Pyramids 
nearer than Grand Cairo ; and when on the 
verge of that interesting region, he was com- 
pelled unwillingly to retrace his steps to the 
French shores. After a tempestuous voyage, 
along the coast of Lybia, he cast anchor off 
the ruins of Carthage ; and thus describes 
his feelings on surveying those venerable 
remains : 

" From the summit of Byrsa, the eye em- 
braces the ruins of Carthage, which are more 
considerable than are generally imagined; 
they resemble those of Sparta, having nothing 
well preserved, but embracing a considerable 
space. I saw them in the middle of February: 
the olives, the fig-trees, were already bursting 
into leaf: large bushes of angelica and acan- 
thus formed tufts of verdure, amidst the re- 
mains of marble of every colour. In the dis- 
tance, I cast my eyes over the Isthmus, the 
double sea, the distant isles, a cerulean sea, a 
smiling plain, and azure mountains. I saw 
forests, and vessels, and aqueducts ; moorish 
villages, and Mahometan hermitages; glitter- 
ing minarets, and the white buildings of Tunis. 
Surrounded with the most touching recollec- 
tions, I thought alternately of Dido, Sophonis- 
ba, and the noble wife of Asdrubal; I contem- 
plated the vast plains where the legions of 
Annibal, Scipio, and Coesar were buried: My 



eyes sought for the site of Utica. Alas ! The 
remains of the palace of Tiberius still remain 
in the island of Capri, and you search in vain 
at Utica for the house of Cato. Finally, the 
terrible Vandals, the rapid Moors, passed be- 
fore my recollection, which terminated at last 
on Saint Louis, expiring on that inhospitable 
shore. May the story of the death of that 
prince terminate this itinerary; fortunate to 
re-enter, as it were, into my country by the 
ancient monument of his virtues, and to close 
at the sepulchre of that King of holy memory 
my long pilgrimage to the tombs of illustrious 
men."— II. 257, 258. 

"As long as his strength permitted, the 
dying monarch gave instructions to his son 
Philip; and when his voice failed him, he 
wrote with a faltering hand these precepts, 
which no Frenchman, worthy of the name, 
will ever be able to read without emotion. 
'My son, the first thing which I enjoin you is 
to love God with all your heart; for without 
that no man can be saved. Beware of vio- 
lating his laws ; rather endure the worst tor- 
ments, than sin against his commandments. 
Should he send you adversity, receive it with 
humility, and bless the hand which chastens 
you ; and believe that you have well deserved 
it, and that it will turn to your weal. Should 
he try you with prosperity, thank him with 
humility of heart, and be not elated by his 
goodness. Do justice to every one, as well 
the poor as the rich. Be liberal, free, and 
courteous to your servants, and cause them to 
love as well as fear you. Should any contro- 
versy or tumult arise, sift it to the bottom, 
whether the result be favourable or unfavour- 
able to your interests. Take care, in an espe- 
cial manner, that your subjects live in peace 
and tranquillity under your reign. Respect 
and preserve their privileges, such as they 
have received them from their ancestors, and 
preserve them with care and love. — And now, 
I give you every blessing which a father can 
bestow on his child; praying the Father, Son, 
and Holy Spirit, that they may defend you from 
all adversities ; and that we may again, after 
this mortal life is ended, be united before God, 
and adore his Majesty for ever !' " — II. 264. 

"The style of Chateaubriand," says Napo- 
leon, "is not that of Racine, it is that of a 
prophet ; he has received from nature the 
sacred flame ; it breathes in all his works."* 
It is of no common man — being a political oppo- 
nent — that Napoleon would have said these 
words. Chateaubriand had done nothing to 
gain favour with the French Emperor ; on the 
contrary, he irritated him by throwing up his 
employment and leaving his country upon the 
assassination of the Duke d'Enghien. In truth, 
nothing is more remarkable amidst the selfish- 
ness of political apostasy in France, than the 
uniform consistence and disinterestedness of 
this great man's opinions. His principles, 
indeed, were not all the same at fifty as at 
twenty-five ; we should be glad to know whose 
are, excepting those who are so obtuse as to 
derive no light from the extension of know- 
ledge and the acquisitions of experience? 



* Memoirs of Napoleon, iv. 342. 



NAPOLEON. 



27 



Change is so far from being despicable, that 
it is highly honourable in itself, and when it 
proceeds from the natural modification of the 
mind, from the progress of years, or the lessons 
of more extended experience. It becomes 
contemptible only when it arises on the sug- 
gestions of interest, or the desires of ambition. 
Now, Chateaubriand's changes of opinion have 
all been in opposition to his interest ; and he 
has suffered at different periods of his life from 
his resistance to the mandates of authority, and 
his rejection of the calls of ambition. In early 
life, he was exiled from France, and shared in 
all the hardships of the emigrants, from his 
attachment to Royalist principles. At the 
earnest request of Napoleon, he accepted of- 
fice under the Imperial Government, but he 
relinquished it, and again became an exile 
upon the murder of the Duke d'Enghien. The 
intluence of his writings was so powerful in 
favour of the Bourbons, at the period of the 
Restoration, that Louis XVIII. truly said, they 
were worth more than an army. He followed 
the dethroned Monarch to Ghent, and con- 
tributed much, by his powerful genius, to con- 
solidate the feeble elements of his power, after 
the fall of Napoleon. Called to the helm of 
affairs in 1824, he laboured to accommodate 
the temper of the monarchy to the increasing 
spirit of freedom in the country, and fell into 
disgrace with the Court, and was distrusted by 
the Royal Family, because he strove to intro- 
duce those popular modifications into the ad- 
ministration of affairs, which might have pre- 
vented the revolution of July; and finally, he 
has resisted all the efforts of the Citizen-King 
to engage his great talents in defence of the 
throne of the Barricades. True to his princi- 
ples, he has exiled himself from France, to 
preserve his independence; and consecrated 
in a foreign land his illustrious name, to the 
defence of the child of misfortune. 

Chateaubriand is not only an eloquent and 
beautiful writer, he is also a profound scholar, 
and an enlightened thinker. His knowledge 
of history and classical literature is equalled 
only by his intimate acquaintance with the 
early annals of the church, and the fathers of 
the Catholic faith; while in his speeches deli- 
vered in the Chamber of Peers since the 
restoration, will be found not only the most 



eloquent but the most complete and satisfac- 
tory dissertations on the political state of 
France during that period, which is anywhere 
to be met with. It is a singular circumstance, 
that an author of such great and varied ac- 
quirements, who is universally allowed by all 
parties in France to be their greatest living 
writer, should be hardly known except by 
name to the great body of readers in this 
country. 

His greatest work, that on which his fame 
will rest with posterity, is the "Genius of 
Christianity," from which such ample quota- 
tions have already been given. The next is 
the "Martyrs," a romance, in which he has 
introduced an exemplification of the principles 
of Christianity, in the early sufferings of the 
primitive church, and enriched the narrative 
by the splendid description of the scenery in 
Egypt, Greece, and Palestine, which he had 
visited during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and 
all the stores of learning which a life spent in 
classical and ecclesiastical lore could accumu- 
late. The last of his considerable publications 
is the " Etudes Historiques," a work eminently 
characteristic of that superiority in historical 
composition, which we have allowed to the 
French modern writers over their contempo- 
raries in this country; and which, we fear, 
another generation, instructed when too late 
by the blood and the tears of a Revolution, 
will be alone able fully to appreciate. Its ob- 
ject is to trace the influence of Christianity 
from its first spread in the Roman empire to 
the rise of civilization in the Western world ; 
a field in which he goes over the ground trod 
by Gibbon, and demonstrates the unbounded 
benefits derived from religion in all the institu- 
tions of modern times. In this noble under- 
taking he has been aided, with a still more 
philosophical mind, though inferior fire and 
eloquence, by Guizot; a writer, who, equally 
with his illustrous rival, is as yet unknown, 
save by report, in this country ; but from 
whose joint labours is to be dated the spring 
of a pure and philosophical system of religious 
inquiry in France, and the commencement of 
that revival of manly devotion, in which the 
antidote, and the only antidote, to the fanati- 
cism of infidelity is to be found. 



NAPOLEON.* 



The age of Napoleon is one, of the delinea- 
tion of which history and biography will never 
be weary. Such is the variety of incidents 
which it exhibits — the splendid and heart-stir- 
ring events which it records — the immortal 
characters which it portrays — and the import- 
ant consequences which have followed from 
it, that the interest felt in its delineation, so 



* Memoires de la Duchesse D' Ahrantes, 2 vols. Cnlburn. 
London. The translations are exeruted by ourselves, as 
we have not seen the English version. 



far from diminishing, seems rather to increase 
with the lapse of time, and will continue 
through all succeeding ages, like the eras of 
Themistocles, Cassar, and the Crusades, to 
form the noblest and most favourite subjects 
of historical description. 

Numerous as have been the Memoirs which 
have issued from the French press during the 
last fifteen years, in relation to this eventful 
era, the public passion for information on it is 
still undiminished. Every new set of memoirs 
which is ushered into the world with an histo- 



28 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



rical name, or any pretensions to authenticity, 
is eagerly read by all classes on the continent. 
English translations generally appear in due 
time, but they are, in general, so extremely ill 
executed, as to give no conception whatever 
of the spirit of the original ; and as there is 
not one reader out of a hundred who can 
read French with such facility as to make it a 
matter of pleasure, the consequence is, that 
these delightful works are still but imperfectly 
known to the British public. Every person 
intimately acquainted with their composition, 
must have perceived in what an extremely 
unfavourable aspect they appear in our ordi- 
nary translations ; and in the utter ignorance 
of the principles of revolution which pervades 
the great bulk of the best informed classes in 
this country, compared to what obtains on the 
other side of the Channel, is to be found the 
best evidence, that the great historical works 
which have recently appeared on the events 
of the last forty years in France, have had no 
share whatever in the formation of public 
opinion in this country. 

The Duchess of Abrantes undertakes the 
work of Memoirs of her own Times with sin- 
gular and almost peculiar advantages. Her 
mother, Madame Permon, a Corsican lady of 
high rank, was extremely intimate with the 
family of Napoleon. She rocked the future 
emperor on her knee from the day of his birth, 
and the intimacy of the families continued till 
he was removed to the command of the army 
of Italy, in April, 1796. The authoress herself, 
though then a child, recounts with admirable 
esprit, and all the air of truth, a number of 
early anecdotes of Napoleon ; and after his 
return from Egypt she was married to Junot, 
then Governor of Paris, and subsequently ad- 
mitted as an habitual guest in the court circle 
of the First Consul. In her Memoirs, we have 
thus a picture of the private and domestic life 
of Napoleon from his cradle to his grave; we 
trace him through all the gradations of the 
Ecole Militaire, the artillery service, the cam- 
paigns of Italy, the return from Egypt, the 
Consulate, and the Empire, and live with those 
who have filled the world with their renown, 
as we would do with our most intimate ac- 
quaintances and friends. 

It has always struck us as a singular proof 
of the practical sagacity and just discrimina- 
tion of character in Sir Walter Scott, that 
though his Life of Napoleon was published 
before the Memoirs of Bourienne, the view 
which he gives of Napoleon's character is 
substantially the same as that drawn by his 
confidential secretary, his school companion, 
and the depositary of his inmost thoughts. 
This is very remarkable. The French are 
never weary of declaiming on the inaccuracies 
of the Scottish biographer, and declare that he 
wrote history in romance, and romance in 
history; but they have never been able to 
point out any serious or important error in 
his narrative. The true reproach against Sir 
Walter's work is of a different kind, and con- 
sists in this, not that he has incorrectly stated 
facts, but unjustly coloured opinions ; that he 
has not done justice to any of the parties 
whose conflicts desolated France during the 



revolution, and has written rather in the spirit 
of an English observer, than one participant 
in the feelings of the actors in those mighty 
events. There is but one way in which this 
defect can be avoided by a native of this 
country, and that is, by devoting himself for a 
long course of years to the study of the me- 
moirs and historians of the Revolution, and by 
acquiring, by incessant converse with the 
writings, somewhat of the spirit which ani- 
mates the people of the continent. The object 
to be attained by this, is not to imbibe their 
prejudices, or become infatuated by their 
errors, but to know and appreciate their ideas, 
and do that justice to passions directed against 
this country, which w r e willingly award to those 
excited in its favour. 

The character of Napoleon has been drawn 
by his contemporaries with more graphic 
power than any other conqueror in history ; 
and yet so varied and singular is the combina- 
tion of qualities which it exhibits, and so much 
at variance with what we usually observe in 
human nature around us, that there is no man 
can say he has a clear perception of what it 
actually was: — Brave, without being chival- 
rous; sometimes humane, seldom generous; 
insatiable in ambition ; inexhaustible in re- 
sources ; without a thirst for blood, but totally 
indifferent to it when his interests were con- 
cerned ; without any fixed ideas on religion, 
but a strong perception of its necessity as a 
part of the mechanism of government; a great 
general with a small army, a mighty conqueror 
with a large one ; gifted with extraordinary 
powers of perception, and the clearest insight 
into every subject connected with mankind ; 
without extensive information derived from 
study ; but the rarest aptitude for making him- 
self master of every subject from actual ob- 
servation ; ardently devoted to glory, and yet 
incapable of the self-sacrifice which consti- 
tutes its highest honours; he exhibited a mix- 
ture of great and selfish qualities, such as 
perhaps never were before combined in any 
single individual. His greatest defect was the 
constant and systematic disregard of truth 
which pervaded all his thoughts. He was 
totally without the droilure, or honesty, which 
forms the best and most dignified feature in 
the Gothic or German character. The maxim, 
Magna est Veritas ct pravahbit, never seems to 
have crossed his mind. His intellect was the 
perfection of that of the Celt or Greek; with- 
out a shadow of the magnanimity and honesty 
which has ever characterized the Roman and 
Gothic races of mankind. Devoted as he was 
to the captivating idol of posthumous fame ; 
deeming, as he did, that to live in the recollec- 
tion and admiration of future ages " constituted 
the true immortality of the soul," he never 
seems to have been aware that truth is essen- 
tial to the purest and most lasting celebrity ; 
and that the veil which artifice or flattery 
draws over falsehood during the prevalence 
of power, will be borne away with a merciless 
hand on its termination. 

In the Memoirs of Napoleon and of the 
Archduke Charles, the opposite character of 
their minds, and of the races to which they 
belonged, is singularly portrayed. Those of 



NAPOLEON. 



29 



the latter are written with a probity, an integ- 
rity, and an impartiality above all praise ; he 
censures himself for his faults with a severity 
unknown to Coesar or Frederick, and touches 
with a light hand on those glorious successes 
which justly gained for him the title of Saviour 
of Germany. Cautious, judicious, and reason- 
able, his arguments convince the understand- 
ing,' but neither kindle the imagination nor 
inspire the fancy. In the Memoirs of Napo- 
leon, on the other hand, dictated to Montholon 
and Gourgaud, there are to be seen in every 
page symptoms of the clearest and most for- 
cible intellect; a coup (Vail over every subject 
of matchless vigour and reach ; an ardent and 
vehement imagination; passions Which have 
ripened under a southern sun, and conceptions 
which have shared in the luxuriant growth of 
tropical climates. Yet amidst all these varied 
excellencies, we often regret the simple bon- 
homie of the German narrative. We admire 
the clearness of the division, the lucid view of 
every subject, the graphic power of the pic- 
tures, and the forcible perspicuity of the lan- 
guage ; but we have a total want of confidence 
in the veracity of the narrative. In every page 
we discover something suppressed or coloured, 
to magnify the importance of the writer in the 
estimation of those who study his work ; and 
while we incessantly recur to it for striking 
political views, or consummate military criti- 
cism, we must consult works of far inferior 
celebrity for the smallest details in which his 
fame was personally concerned. We may 
trust him in speculations on the future destiny 
of nations, the. march of revolutions, or the 
cause of military success ; but we cannot rely 
on the numbers stated to have been engaged, 
or the killed and wounded in a single engage- 
ment. 

The character of Napoleon has mainly rest- 
ed, since the publication of his work, on Bou- 
rienne's Memoirs. The peculiar opportunities 
which he had of becoming acquainted with the 
inmost thoughts of the First Consul, and the 
ability and graphic powers of his narrative, 
have justly secured for it an immense reputa- 
tion. It is probable that the private character 
and hidden motives of Napoleon will mainly 
rest with posterity on that celebrated work. 
Every day brings out something to support its 
veracity ; and the concurring testimony of the 
most intelligent of the contemporary writers 
tends to show, that his narrative is, upon the 
whole, the most faithful that has yet been pub- 
lished. Still it is obvious that there is a secret 
rankling at the bottom of Bourienne's heart 
against his old schoolfellow. He could hardly 
be expected to forgive the extraordinary rise 
and matchless celebrity of one who had so long 
been his equal. He evinces the highest admi- 
ration for the Emperor, and, upon the whole, 
has probably done him justice; yet, upon par- 
ticular points, a secret spleen is apparent; and 
though there seems no ground for discrediting 
most of his facts, yet we must not in every in- 
stance adopt implicitly the colouring in which 
he has painted them. It is quite plain that 
Bourienne was involved in some money trans- 
actions, in which Napoleon conceived that he 
made an improper use of the state secrets j 



which came to his knowledge, in his official 
situation of private secretary; and that to this 
cause his exile into honourable and lucrative 
banishment at Hamburgh is to be ascribed. 
Whether this banishment was justly or un- 
justly inflicted, is immaterial in considering 
the credit due to the narrative. If he was hard- 
ly dealt with, while our opinion of his indivi- 
dual integrity must rise, the weight of the 
feelings of exasperation with which he was 
animated must receive a proportional augmen- 
tation. 

The Memoirs of the Duchess of Abrantes 
are well qualified to correct the bias, and sup- 
ply the deficiencies of those of his private se- 
cretary. As a woman, she had no personal 
rivalry with Napoleon, and could not feel her- 
self mortified by his transcendant success. As 
the wife of one of his favourite and most pros- 
perous generals, she had no secret reasons of 
animosity against the author of her husband's 
elevation. Her intimate acquaintance also 
with Napoleon, from his very infancy, and be- 
fore flattery or power had aggravated the faults 
of his character, renders her peculiarly well 
qualified to portray its original tendency. Many 
new lights, accordingly, have been thrown 
upon the eventful period of his reign, as well 
as his real character, by her Memoirs. His 
disposition appears in a more amiable light— 
his motives are of a higher kind, than fron. 
preceding accounts ; and we rise from the pe- 
rusal of her fascinating volumes with the 1m 
pression, which the more extensively we studj 
human nature we shall find to be the more 
correct, that men are generally more amiable 
at bottom than we should be inclined to ima- 
gine from their public conduct ; that their faults 
are fully as much the result of the circum- 
stances" in which they are placed, as of any 
inherent depravity of disposition; and that 
dealing gently with those who are earned along 
on the stream of revolution, we should reserve 
the weight of our indignation for those who 
put the perilous torrent in motion. 

But leaving these general speculations, it is 
time to lay before our readers a few extracts 
from these volumes themselves, and to com- 
municate some portion of the pleasure which 
we have derived from their perusal. In doing 
so we shall adopt our usual plan of translating 
the passages ourselves; for it is impossible 
to convey the least idea of the original in the 
circumlocutions of the ordinary London ver- 
sions. 

Of the early youth of Napoleon at the Lcole 
Militaire of Paris, with the management of 
which he was in the highest degree dissatisfied, 
we have the following interesting account : — 
" When we got into the carriage, Napoleon, 
who had contained himself before his sister, 
broke out into the most violent invectives 
against the administration of such places as the 
Maison St. Cyr, for young ladies, and the Ecole 
Militaire for cadets. My uncle, who was ex- 
tremely quick in his temper, at last got out of 
all patience at the tone of cutting bitterness 
which appeared in his language, and told him 
so without reserve. Napoleon was then silent, 
for enough of good breeding still remained to 
make youth respect the voice of those advanced 



30 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



in years. But his heart was so full as to be 
almost bursting. Shortly after he led back the 
conversation to the subject, and at last his ex- 
pressions became so offensive that my father 
said to him rudely, ' Be silent ; it ill becomes 
you, who are educated at the expense of the 
King, to speak in that manner.' 

" My mother has often since told me, she 
was afraid Napoleon would be suffocated at 
these words. In an instant he became pale 
and inarticulate. When he recovered his voice, 
he exclaimed in a voice trembling with emo- 
tion, ' I am not an eleve of the King, but of the 
State.' 

"'A fine distinction, truly,' replied my un- 
cle. ' Whether you are an eleve of the King, 
or of the State, is of no consequence; besides, 
is not the King the State? I desire that you 
will not speak in such terms of your benefactor 
in my presence.' 

" ' I will do nothing to displease you, M. 
Comnene,' replied the young man. '■ Permit me 
only to add, that if I was the master, and had the 
power to alter these regulations, they should 
be very different, and for the good of the whole.' 

" I have recounted that scene only to remark 
these words — ' If I was the master.' He has 
since become so, and all the world knows what 
he has done for the administration of the Ecole 
Militaire. I am convinced that he long enter- 
tained a painful sense of the humiliation he 
underwent at that establishment. At our ar- 
rival in Paris, he had been a year there, and 
that whole period was one of contradiction and 
disgust. He was not loved by his companions. 
Many persons who were acquainted with my 
father, declared to him that Napoleon's charac- 
ter was such as could not be rendered sociable. 
He was discontented with every thing, and ex- 
pressed his censure aloud in such decided 
terms, as made him pass with these old wor- 
thies for a young firebrand. The result of this 
conduct was, that his removal into a regiment 
was unanimously demanded by every one at 
the school, and thus it advanced the period of 
his promotion. He obtained a sub-lieutenancy, 
which was stationed at Grenoble. Before his 
departure, he came to live some time with us: 
my sister was at a convent, but she came fre- 
quently home during the period of her vacation. 
I recollect that the day when he first put on his 
uniform, he was as joyous as young men gene- 
rally are on such an occasion: but his boots 
gave a singularly ridiculous appearance to his 
figure : they were of such enormous dimensions, 
that his little thin legs quite disappeared with- 
in them. Everybody knows that nothing has 
so quick an eye for the ridiculous as childhood, 
so the moment that my sister and I saw him 
come into the room with these enormous boots, 
we burst out into immoderate fits of laughter. 
Then, as subsequently, he could not endure 
pleasantry, when he was its object: my sister, 
who was considerably older than I, answered, 
that as he had girded on his sword, he should 
consider himself as the Chevalier of Dames, 
and be highly flattered by their joking with 
him 

" ' It is easy to see,' said Napoleon with a 
haughty air, ' that you are a little miss just let 
loose from school.' 



"My sister was then thirteen years old: it 
may easily be imagined how such an expres- 
sion hurt her. She was of a ver) r gentle dis- 
position, — but neither she nor any other wo- 
man, whatever her age or disposition may be, 
can bear a direct insult to her vanity — that of 
Cecile was keenly offended at the expression 
of little miss escaped from school. 

"'And you,' said she, ' are nothing but a 
Puss in Boots.' 

" Everyone burst out a laughing: the stroke 
had told most effectually. I cannot describe 
the wrath of Napoleon ; he answered nothing, 
and it was as well he did not. My mother 
thought the epithet so well applied, that she 
laughed with all her heart. Napoleon, though 
little accustomed at that time to the usage of 
the world, had a mind too fine, too strong an 
instinctive perception, not to see that it was 
necessary to be silent when his adversary was 
a woman, and personalities were dealt in: 
whatever her age was, she was entitled to re- 
spect. At least, such was then the code of po- 
liteness in those who dined at table. Now that 
utility and personal interest alone are the order 
of the day, the consumption of time in such 
pieces of politeness is complained of: and 
every one grudges the sacrifices necessary to 
carry into the world his little contingent of so- 
ciability. 

" Bonaparte, though grievously piqued at 
the unfortunate epithet applied to him by my 
sister, affected to disregard it, and began to 
laugh like the rest; and to prove that he bore 
her no ill will on that account, he bought a 
little present, on which was engraved a Puss 
in Boots, running before the carriage of the 
Marquis of Carabus. This present cost him a 
good deal, which assorted ill with the strait- 
ened state of his finances. He added a beau- 
tiful edition of 'Puss in Boots,' for my sister, 
telling her that it was a Souvenir whiten he beg- 
ged her to keep for his sake. 

" ' The story-book,' said my mother, ' is too 
much : if there had only been the engraving, 
it was all well ; but the book for Cecile, shows 
you were piqued against her.' 

" He gave his word to the contrary. But I 
still think with my mother, that he was piqued, 
and bitterly so: the whole story was of no small 
service to me at a future time, as will appear 
in the sequel to these memoirs."' — I. 52, 53. 

Several interesting anecdotes are preserved 
of the Reign of Terror, singularly characteris- 
tic of the horrors of that eventful period. The 
following picture is evidently drawn from the 
life :— 

" On the following da)', my brother Albert 
was obliged to remain a considerable time at 
home, to put in order the papers which my 
father had directed to be burnt. He went out 
at three o'clock to see us: he found on the road 
groups of men in a state of horrible and bloody 
drunkenness. Many were naked down to the 
waist; their arms, their breasts bathed in blood. 
At the end of their pikes, they bore fragments 
of clothes and bloody remnants: their looks 
were haggard; their eyes inflamed. As he ad- 
vanced, these groups became more frequent 
and hideous. My brother, mortally alarmed 
as to our fate, and determined at all hazards 



NAPOLEON. 



31 



to rejoin us, pushed on his horse along the 
Boulevard where he then was, and arrived in 
front of the Palace Beaumarchais. There he 
was arrested by an immense crowd, composed 
of the same naked and bloody men, but with 
an expression of countenance altogether infer- 
nal. They set up hideous cries: they sung, 
they danced ; the Saturnalia of Hell were be- 
fore him. No sooner did they see the cabriolet 
of Albert, than they raised still louder yells : 
an aristocrat ! an aristocrat ! and in a moment 
the cabriolet was surrounded by a raging mul- 
titude, in the midst of which an object was 
elevated and presented to his view. Troubled 
as the sight of my brother was, he could dis- 
tinguish long white hair, clotted with blood, 
and a face beautiful even in death. The figure 
is brought nearer, and its lips placed on his. 
The unhappy wretch set up a frightful cry. 
He knew the head: it was that of the Princess 
Lamballe. 

"The coachman whipped the horse with all 
his strength ; and the generous animal, with 
that aversion for blood which characterizes its 
race, rushed from that spectacle of horror with 
redoubled speed. The frightful trophy was 
overturned, with the cannibals who bore it, by 
the wheels of the carriage, and a thousand 
imprecations followed my brother, who lay 
stretched out insensible in the bottom of the 
cabriolet. 

" Serious consequences resulted to my bro- 
ther from that scene of horror. He was car- 
ried to a physician, where he was soon taken 
seriously ill of a burning fever. Inhis delirium, 
the frightful figure was ever present to his ima- 
gination. He never ceased, for days together, 
to see that livid head and those fair tresses 
bathed in blood. For years after, he could not 
recall the recollection of that horrible event 
without falling into a swoon, nor think of those 
days of wo without the most vivid emotion. 

"A singular circumstance concluded this 
tale of horror. My brother, in 1802, when 
Commissary General of Police at Marseilles, 
received secret instructions to watch, with 
peculiar care, over a man named Raymonet, 
but whose real name was different. He lived 
in a small cottage on the banks of the sea; ap- 
peared in comfortable circumstances, but had 
no relation nor friend; he lived alone in his 
solitary cabin, and received every morning his 
provisions from an old woman, who brought 
them to his gate. The secret instructions of 
the police revealed the fact, that this person 
had been one of the principal assassins at the 
Abbaye and La Force, in September, 1792, and 
was in an especial manner noted as the most 
cruel of the assassins of the Princess Lam- 
balle. 

" One morning my brother received intelli- 
gence that this man was at the point of death; 
and, gracious God! what a death! For three 
days he had endured all the torments of hell. 
The accident which had befallen him was per- 
fectly natural in its origin, but it had made him 
suffer the most excruciating pains. He was 
alone in his habitation ; he was obliged to drag 
himself to the nearest surgeon to obtain assist- 
ance, but it was too late : an operation was im- 
possible, and would not even have assuaged 



the pains of the dying wretch. He refused 
alike religious succour and words of consola- 
tion. His deathbed was a chair of torture in- 
comparably more agonizing than the martyr- 
dom of a Christian. He died with blasphemies 
in his mouth, like the Reprobate in Dante's 
Inferno." — I. 95. 

The French, who have gone through the 
Revolution, frequently complain that there are 
no descriptions given in any historical works 
which convey the least idea of the Reign of 
Terror; so infinitely did the reality of that 
dreadful period exceed all that description can 
convey of the terrible. There might, however, 
we are persuaded, be extracted from the con- 
temporary Memoirs (for in no other quartei 
can the materials be found) a picture of that 
memorable era, which would exceed all that 
Shakspeare or Dante had figured of human 
atrocity, and take its place beside the plague 
in Thucydides, and the Annals of Tacitus, as a 
lasting beacon to the human race, of the un- 
heard of horrors following in the train of de- 
mocratic ascendancy. 

One of the most curious parts of the Duch- 
ess's work is that which relates to the arrest 
of Napoleon after the fall of Robespierre, in 
consequence of the suspicions that attached to 
him, from his mission to Genoa with the bro- 
ther of that tyrant. It appears, that whatever 
he may have become afterwards, Napoleon was 
at that period an ardent republican: not pro- 
bably because the principles of democracy 
were suited to his inclinations, but because he 
found in the favour of that faction, then the 
ruling power in France, the only means of gra- 
tifying his ambition. Salicetti, one of the de- 
puties from Corsica, occasioned his arrest after 
the fall of Robespierre, and he was actually a 
few days in custody. Subsequently, Salicetti 
himself was denounced by the Convention, and 
concealed in the house of Madame Pennon, 
mother to the Duchess of Abrantes. The whole 
details which follow this event are highly inte- 
resting; and as they afford one of the few really 
generous traits of Napoleon's character, we 
willingly give them a place. 

" The retreat of Salicetti in our house was 
admirably contrived. His little cabinet was 
so stuffed with cushions and tapestry, that the 
smallest sound could not be heard. No one 
could have imagined where he was concealed. 

" On the following morning at eleven o'clock, 
Napoleon arrived. He was dressed in his usual 
costume; a gray great-coat buttoned up to the 
throat, — a black neckcloth, — round hat, which 
came down over the eyes. To say the truth, 
at that period no one was elegantly dressed, 
and the personal appearance of Napoleon did 
not appear so singular as it now does, upon 
looking back to the period. He had in his 
hand a bouquet of violets, which he presented 
to my mother. That piece of gallantry was so 
unusual in him, that we immediately began to 
laugh. " It appears,' said he, ' I am not au fail 
at my new duties of Cavaliere Servente.' 
Then changing the subject, he added, ' Well, 
Madame Permon, Salicetti has, in his turn, 
reaped the bitter fruits of arrest. They must 
be the more difficult to swallow, that he and 
his associates have planted the trees on which 



32 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



they grow.' ' What !' said my mother, with an 
air of surprise, and making a sign to me at the 
same time to shut the door, 'is Salicetti arrest- 
ed?' 'Do you not know,' replied Napoleon, 
' that his arrest was yesterday decreed at the 
Assembly? I thought you knew it so well, 
that he was concealed in your house.' ' In my 
house !' replied my mother, with a well-feigned 
air of surprise ; ' Napoleon, my dear child, you 
are mad! In my house ! That implies that I 
have one, which unfortunately is not the case. 
My dear General, I beg you will not repeat 
such nonsense. What have I done to entitle 
yoil thus to sport with me as if I were deranged, 
for I can call it nothing else ?' 

" At these words Napoleon rose up ; he 
crossed his arms, advanced immediately op- 
posite to my mother, where he stood for some 
time without saying a word. My mother bore, 
without flinching, his piercing look, and did not 
so much as drop her eyelid under that eagle's 
eye. 'Madame Permon,' said he at length, 
' Salicetti is concealed in your house : nay, do 
not interrupt me. I do not know it for certain, 
but I have no doubt of it, because yesterday at 
five o'clock he was seen on the Boulevard, 
coming in this direction, after he had received 
intelligence of the decree of the Assembly. He 
has no friend in this quarter who would risk life 
and liberty to save him but yourself; there can 
be no doubt, therefore, where he is concealed.' 
"This long harangue gave my mother time 
to regain her assurance. 'What title could 
Salicetti have to demand an asylum from me? 
He knows that our sentiments are not the same. 
I was on the point of setting out, and had it 
not been for an accidental letter from my hus- 
band, I would have been now far advanced on 
my road to Gascony.' 

"'What title had he to seek an asylum in 
your house?' replied Napoleon, 'that is the 
justest observation you have yet made,Madame 
Permon. To take refuge with a lonely woman, 
who might be compromised for a few hours of 
concealment to a proscribed culprit, is an act 
that no one else would be capable of. You are 
indeed his debtor ; are you not, Mademoiselle 
Loulou?' said he, turning to me, who had 
hitherto remained silent in the window. 

" I feigned to be engaged with flower-pots in 
a window, where there were several bushes of 
arbutus, and did not answer him. My mother, 
who understood my motive, said to me, 'Ge- 
neral Bonaparte speaks to you, my dear.' I 
then turned to him ; the remains of my trouble 
might show him what had passed in the mind 
of a girl of fifteen, who was compelled, in spite 
of herself, to do an impolite thing. He took 
my hand, pressed it between his two, and, 
turning to my mother, exclaimed, 'I ask your 
pardon; I have been in the wrong; your 
daughter has given me a lesson.' 'You give 
Laurette more merit than she really has,' re- 
plied my mother. ' She has not given 3 r ou a 
lesson, because she does not know wherefore 
she should do so; but I will do so immediately, 
if you persist in believing a thing which has 
no foundation, but might do me irreparable 
mischief if it were spread abroad.' 

"Bonaparte said, with a voice full of emo- 
tion 'Madame Permon, you are an uncom- 



monly generous woman, and that man is a 
Avicked man. You could not have closed your 
door upon him, and he knew it ; and yet you 
expose yourself and that child for such a man. 
Formerly I hated him ; now I despise him. He 
has done me a great deal of harm; yes, he has 
done me a great deal of harm, and you know 
it. He has had the malice to take advantage 
of his momentary ascendency to strive to sink 
me below the water. He has accused me of 
crimes ; for what crime can be so great as to 
be a traitor to your country? Salicetti con- 
ducted himself in that affair of Loano, and my 
arrest, like a miserable wretch. Junot was 
going to have killed him, if I had not prevented 
him. That young man, full of fire and friend- 
ship for me, was anxious to have fought him 
in single combat ; he declared that if he would 
not fight, he would have thrown him over the 
window. Now he is proscribed; Salicetti, in 
his turn, can now appreciate the full extent 
of what it is to have one's destiny shattered, 
ruined by an accusation.' 

" ' Napoleon,' said my mother, stretching out 
her hand to him, ' Salicetti is not here. I swear 
he is not. And must I tell you all ?' ' Tell it; 
tell it,' said he, with extreme impatience. 
' Well, Salicetti was here yesterday at six 
o'clock, but he went out at half-past eight. I 
convinced him of the impossibility of his 
remaining concealed in furnished lodgings. 
He admitted it, and went away.' 

" While my mother spoke, the eyes of Na- 
poleon continued fixed upon her with an eager- 
ness of which it is impossible to convey an 
idea. Immediately after, he moved aside, and 
walked rapidly through the chamber. 'I was 
right, then, after all,' he exclaimed. ' He had 
then the cowardice to say to a generous woman, 
Give your life for me. But did he who thus 
contrived to interest you in his fate, tell you 
that he had just assassinated one of his col- 
leagues ? Did he wash his hands before he 
touched yours to implore mercy ?' 

" 'Napoleon, Napoleon !' exclaimed my mo- 
ther in Italian, and with great emotion, ' this is 
too much. Be silent, or I must be gone. If 
they have murdered this man after he left me, 
at least it is no fault of mine.' Napoleon at 
this time was not less moved. He sought 
about everywhere like a hound after its prey. 
He constantly listened to hear him, but could 
make out nothing. My mother was in despair. 
Salicetti heard every thing. A single plank 
separated him from us ; and I, in my inexpe- 
rience, trembled lest he should issue from his 
retreat and betray us all. At length, after a 
fruitless search of two hours, he rose and went 
away. It was full time ; my mother was worn 
out with mortal disquietude. ' A thousand 
thanks,' said he, as he left the room; 'and 
above all, Madame Permon, forgive me. But 
if you had ever been injured as I have been 
by that man ! Adieu !' "—I. 147, 148. 

A few days after, Madame Permon set out 
for Gascony, with Salicetti, disguised as a foot- 
man, seated behind the carriage. Hardly had 
they arrived at the first post, when a man ar- 
rived on horseback, with a letter for Madame 
Permon. They were all in despair, conceiv- 
ing they were discovered, but upon opening it, 



NAPOLEON. 



33 



their apprehensions were dispelled; it was 
from Bonaparte, who had received certain in- 
telligence from his servant that Salicetti, his 
mortal enemy, was in the carriage with her, 
and had been concealed in her house. He 
had learned it from his servant, who became 
acquainted with it from Madame Permon's 
maid, who, though faithful to misfortune, could 
not conceal the secret from love. It was in 
the following terms : — 

" I never wished to pass for a hypocrite. I 
would be so, if I did not declare that for more 
than twenty days I have known for certain that 
Salicetti was concealed in your house. Recol- 
lect my words on the 1st Prairial ; I was then 
almost sure of it, now I know it beyond a doubt. 
Salicetti, you see I could repay you the injury 
you have done me ; in doing so, I should only 
have requited the evil which you did to me, 
whilst you gratuitously injured one who had 
never offended you. Which is the nobler part 
at this moment — yours or mine 1 I have it in 
my power to revenge myself, but I will not do 
it. — Perhaps you will say that your benefac- 
tress serves as your shield, and I own that that 
consideration is powerful. But though you 
were alone, unarmed, and proscribed, your 
head would be safe from my hands. Go — seek 
in peace an asylum where you may become 
animated with nobler sentiments towards your 
country. My mouth is closed on your name, 
and will never open more on that subject. 
Repent, and appreciate my motives. I deserve 
it, for they are noble and generous. — Madame 
Permon — My warmest wishes attend you and 
your daughter. You are two helpless beings, 
without defence. May Providence and the 
prayers of a friend be ever with you ! Be 
prudent, and do not stop in the great towns. 
Adieu ! receive my kindest regards. — N. Bo- 
naparte." — I. 160. 

We regard this letter and the previous 
transaction to which it refers, if it shall be 
deemed by those intimately acquainted with 
the parties as perfectly authentic, as by far the 
most important trait in the character of Na- 
poleon during his early life which has yet ap- 
peared. It demonstrates that at that period at 
least his heart was accessible to generous sen- 
timents, and that he was capable of perform- 
ing a noble action. Admitting that he was, in 
a great degree, swayed in this proceeding by his 
regard for Madame Permon, who appears to 
have been a woman of great attractions, and 
for whom, as we shall presently see, he con- 
ceived warmer feelings than those of mere 
friendship, still it is not an ordinary character, 
and still less not an ordinary Italian character, 
which, from such motives, would forego the 
fiendish luxury of revenge. This trait, there- 
fore, demonstrates that Napoleon's character 
originally was not destitute of generosity; and 
the more charitable, and probably the more 
just, inference is, that the selfishness and ego- 
tism by which he was afterwards so strongly 
characterized, arose from that uninterrupted 
and extraordinary flow of prosperity which 
befell him, and which experience everywhere 
proves is more fatal to generosity or interest 
in others than any thing else in the course of 
man here below. 

5 



On the voyage along the charming banks 
of the Garonne from Bordeaux to Toulouse, 
our authoress gives the following just and in- 
teresting account : — 

" That mind must be really disquieted or in. 
suffering, which does not derive the highest 
pleasure from the voyage by water from Bor- 
deaux to Toulouse. I have seen since the 
shores of the Aimo, those of the Po, the Tagus, 
and the Brenta; I have seen the Arno in its 
thundering cascade, and in its placid waters ; 
all traverse fertile plains, and exhibit ravish- 
ing points of view: but none of them recall 
the magical illusion of the voyage from Bor- 
deaux to Toulouse. Marmande, Agen, Lan- 
gon, La Reole, — all those towns whose names 
are associated with our most interesting recol- 
lections, are there associated with natural 
scenery prodigal of beauty, and illuminated 
by a resplendent sun and a pure atmosphere. 
I can conceive nothing more beautiful than 
those enchanted banks from Reole to Agen. 
Groups of trees, Gothic towers, old castles, 
venerable steeples, which then, alas! no longer 
called the Catholics to prayer. Alas ! at that 
time, even the bells were absent, — they no 
longer called the faithful to the house of God. 
Every thing was sad and deserted around that 
antique porch. The grass was growing between 
the stones of the tombs in the nave; and the 
shepherd was afar off, preaching the word of 
God in distant lands, while his flock, deprived 
of the Bread of Life, beheld their infants 
springing up around them, without any more 
religious instruction than the savages of the 
desert." — I. 166. 

The fact here mentioned of the total want of 
religious instruction in the people of the 
country in France, is by far the most serious 
consequence which has followed the tempests 
of the Revolution. The thread of religious in- 
struction from parent to child, has, for the 
first time since the introduction of Christianity 
in the western world, been broken over nearly 
a whole nation. A whole generation has not 
only been born, but educated and bred up to 
manhood, without any other religious impres- 
sions than what they received from the tradi- 
tions of their parents. Lavalette has recorded, 
that during the campaigns of Napoleon in 
Italy, the soldiers never once entered a church, 
and looked upon the ceremonies of the Catho- 
lics in the same way as they would have done 
on the superstition of Hindostan or Mexico. 
So utterly ignorant were they of the elements 
even of religious knowledge, that when they 
crossed from Egjrpt into Syria, they knew not 
that they were near the places celebrated in 
Holy Writ; they drank without consciousness 
at the fountains of Moses, wound without 
emotion round the foot of Mount Sinai, and 
quartered at Bethlehem and on Mount Carmel, 
ignorant alike of the cradle of Christianity, or 
of the glorious efforts of their ancestors in 
those scenes to regain possession of the Holy 
Sepulchre. 

What the ultimate consequences of this 
universal and unparalleled break in religious 
instruction must be, it is not difficult to fore- 
tell. The restoration of the Christian worship 
by Napoleon, the efforts of the Bourbons during 



34 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



fifteen years to restore its sway, have proved 
in a great degree nugatory : Christianity, re- 
appearing in the garb of political power, has 
lost its original and destined hold of the peo- 
ple ; it is regarded by all the ardent and impe- 
tuous part of the nation, as a mere collection 
of antiquated prejudices or nursery tales, 
adopted by government for political purposes, 
and fitted only to enslave and fetter the human 
mind. The consequence has been, an univer- 
sal emancipation of the nation, in towns at 
least, from the fetters of religion, — a dissolu- 
tion of manners pervading the middling and 
lower orders to a degree unparalleled in mo- 
dern Europe, — and an universal inclination in 
the higher to adopt selfish maxims in life, and 
act upon the principles of individual interest 
and elevation. This is the great feature of 
modern society in France, — the distinguishing 
characteristic which is alike deplored by their 
writers, and observed by the strangers who 
visit their country. They are fast descending 
into the selfishness and egotism which, in 
ancient times, were the invariable forerunners 
of political decline. This character has be- 
come incapable of sustaining genuine freedom; 
from the fountains of selfishness its noble 
streams never yet flowed. The tempests of 
democracy will for a time agitate France, 
because the people will long strive to shake 
off the restraints of government and religion, 
in order that no fetters may be imposed on 
their passions ; when they have discovered, 
as they will soon do, that this leads only to 
universal suffering, they will sink down 
quietly and for ever under the shadow of des- 
potism. And this will be the consequence and 
the punishment of their abandonment of that 
which constitutes the sole basis of lasting or 
general freedom — the Christian religion and 
private virtue. 

One of the convulsions attended with the 
least suffering in the whole course of the Re- 
volution, was the 13th Vendemiare, 1795, 
when Napoleon, at the head of the troops of 
the Convention, 5000 strong, defeated 40,000 
of the National Guard of Paris, on the very 
ground at the Tuileries, which was rendered 
famous, thirty-five years after, by the over- 
throw of Charles X. and the dynasty of the 
Bourbons. The following description, how- 
ever, conveys a lively picture of what civil 
war is, even in its least horrible forms. 

"During some hours, we flattered ourselves 
that matters would be arranged between the 
National Guards and the Convention ; but 
suddenly at half-past four the cannon began 
to discharge. Hardly was the first report 
heard, when the reply began on all sides. The 
effect was immediate and terrible on my poor 
father; he uttered a piercing cry, and calling 
for succour, was soon seized with a violent 
delirium. In vain we gave him the soothing 
draughts which had been prescribed by M. 
Duchesnois. All the terrific scenes of the Re- 
volution passed before his eyes, and every 
new discharge which was heard pierced him 
to the heart. What a day! what a night! Our 
windows were broken to pieces ; towards the 
evening the section retired, and they fought 
under our eyes ; but when they came to the 



church of St. Roch, and the theatre of the Re- 
public, it seemed as if the house would fall to 
pieces. 

"My father was in agony; he cried, he 
wept. Never shall I forget the horrors of that 
terrible time. Our terrors rose to the highest 
pitch, when we heard that barricades were 
erected in the Rue de la Loi. Every hour of 
that dreadful night was to me like the hour of 
the damned, of which Father Bridagne speaks, 
Toujours jamais. I loved my father with the 
sincerest affection, and I adored my mother. I 
saw the one dying with the discharges of can- 
non, which resounded in his ears, while the 
other, stretched at the foot of that bed of death, 
seemed ready to follow him. There are some 
recollections which are eternal ; never will the 
remembrance of that dreadful night, and of 
those two days, be effaced from my memory; 
they are engraven on my mind with a burning 
iron." — I. p. 190. 

Salicetti fell ill in their house, from anxiety 
on account of the fate of Rome and his accom- 
plices, who were brought to trial for a con- 
spiracy to restore the Reign of Terror. The 
picture she gives of his state of mind when on 
the bed of sickness, is finely descriptive of the 
whirl of agony which infidelity and democracy 
produce. 

" We had soon a new torment to undergo ; 
Salicetti fell ill. Nothing can equal the hor- 
rors of his situation ; he was in a high fever, 
and delirious ; but what he said, what he saw, 
exceeds any thing that can be conceived. I 
have read many romances which portrayed a 
similar situation. Alas ! how their description 
falls short of the truth ! Never have I read 
any thing which approached it — Salicetti had 
no religion ; that added to the horrors of these 
dreadful scenes. He did not utter complaints ; 
blasphemies were eternally poured forth. The 
death of Rome and his friends produced the 
most terrible effect on his mind ; their tragic 
fate was incessantly present to his thoughts. 
One, in particular, seemed never to quit his 
bedside ; he spoke to him, he listened, he 
answered ; the dialogues between them, for he 
answered for his dead friend, were enough to 
turn our brains. Sometimes he fancied him- 
self in a chamber red with blood. But what 
caused me more terror than all the rest, was 
the low and modulated tone of his voice during 
his delirium ; it would appear that terror had 
mastered all his other faculties, even the 
acutest sufferings. No words can convey an 
idea of the horror inspired by that pale and 
extenuated man, uttering, on a bed of death, 
blasphemies and anathemas in a voice modu- 
lated and subdued by terror. I am at a loss to 
convey the impression of what I felt, for, 
though so vividly engraven on my memory, I 
know not how to give it a name." — I. p. 156. 

It is well sometimes to follow the irreligious 
and the Jacobins to their latter end. How 
desperately do these men of blood then quail 
under the prospect of the calamities they have 
inflicted on others; how terribly does the evil 
they have committed return on their own 
heads; how infinitely does the scene drawn 
from the life, exceed all that the imagination 
of Dante could conceive of the terrible ! 



NAPOLEON. 



35 



It is well known what a dreadful famine 
prevailed in Paris for some time after the sup- 
pression of the revolt of the 13th Vendemiare. 
Our authoress supplies us with several anec- 
dotes, highly characteristic of the period, and 
which place Bonaparte's character in a very 
favourable light. 

"At that period famine prevailed in Paris, 
with more severity than anywhere else in 
France ; the people were literally suffering 
under want of bread ; the other necessaries of 
life were not less deficient. What an epoch! 
Great God ! the misery was frightful — the 
depreciation of the assignats went on aug- 
menting with the public suffering — the poor, 
totally without work, died in their hovels, or 
issuing forth in desperation, joined the rob- 
bers, who infested all the roads in the 
country. 

" Bonaparte was then of great service to us. 
We had white bread for our own consump- 
tion; but our servants had only the black 
bread of the Sections, which was unwholesome 
and hardly eatable. Bonaparte sent us every 
day some rolls for breakfast, which he came 
to eat with us with the greatest satisfaction. 
At that period, I can affirm with confidence, 
since he associated me in his acts of benefi- 
cence, that Napoleon saved the lives of above 
a hundred families. He made domiciliary dis- 
tributions of bread and wood, which his situa- 
tion as military commander enabled him to do. 
I was intrusted with the division of these 
gifts among ten families, who were dying of 
famine. The greater part of them lodged in 
the Rue St. Nicholas, close to our house. That 
street was inhabited at that time by the poorest 
class. No one who has not ascended one of 
its crowded stairs, has an idea of what real 
misery is. 

" One day Bonaparte, coming to dine at 
my mother's, was stopped in alighting from 
his carriage by a woman, who bore the dead 
body of an infant in her arms. It was the 
youngest of six children. Misery and famine 
had dried up her milk. Her little child had 
just died — it was not yet cold. Seeing every 
day an officer with a splendid uniform alight 
at our house, she came to beg bread from him, 
'in order,' as she expressed it, 'that her other 
infants should not share the fate of the youngest 
— and if I get nothing, I will take the whole 
five, and we will throw ourselves together into 
the river.' 

" This was no vain threat on the part of that 
unhappy woman, for at that period suicides 
succeeded each other every day. Nothing was 
talked of but the tragic end of some family. 
Bonaparte entered the room with the expres- 
sion of melancholy, which did not leave him 
during the whole of dinner. He had at the 
moment given a few assignats to that unhappy 
woman ; but after we rose from table, he 
begged my mother to make some inquiries 
concerning her. She did so, and found that 
her story was all true, and that she was of 
good character. Napoleon paid her the wages 
due to her deceased husband by the govern- 
ment, and got for her a small pension. She 
succeeded in bringing up her children, who 
ever after retained the most lively sense of 



gratitude towards 'the General,' as they called 
their benefactor." — I. 195. 

The Duchess gives a striking picture of the 
difference in the fashions and habits of living 
which has resulted from the Revolution. Be- 
ing on a subject where a woman's observations 
are more likely to be accurate than those of a 
man, we willingly give a place to her observa- 
tions. 

"Transported from Corsica to Paris at the 
close of the reign of Louis XV., my mother 
had imbibed a second nature in the midst of 
the luxuries and excellencies of that period. 
We flatter ourselves that we have gained 
much by our changes in that particular; but 
we are quite wrong. Forty thousand livres a 
year, fifty years ago, would have commanded 
more luxury than two hundred thousand now. 
The elegancies that at that period surrounded 
a woman of fashion cannot be numbered; a 
profusion of luxuries were in common use, 
of which even the name is now forgotten. The 
furniture of her sleeping apartment — the bath 
in daily use — the ample folds of silk and velvet 
which covered the windows — the perfumes 
which filled the room; the rich laces and dresses 
which adorned the wardrobe, were widely dif- 
ferent from the ephemeral and insufficient 
articles by which they have been replaced. 
My opinion is daily receiving confirmation; 
for every thing belonging to the last age is 
daily coming again into fashion, and I hope 
soon to see totally expelled all those fashions 
of Greece and Rome, which did admirably well 
under the climate of Rome or Messina, but are 
ill adapted for our vent du bize and cloudy 
atmosphere. A piece of muslin suspended 
on a gilt rod, is really of no other use but to 
let a spectator see that he is behind the cur- 
tain. It is the same with the imitation tapestry 
— the walls, six inches thick, which neither 
keep out the heat in summer, nor the cold in 
winter. All the other parts of modern dress 
and furniture are comprised in my anathema, 
and will always continue to be so. 

" It is said that every thing is simplified, 
and brought down to the reach of the most 
moderate fortunes. That is true in one sense ; 
that is to say, our confectioner has muslin 
curtains and gilt rods at his windows, and his 
wife has a silk cloak as well as ourselves, be- 
cause it is become so thin that it is indeed 
accessible to every one, but it keeps no one 
warm. It is the same with all the other stuffs. 
We must not deceive ourselves ; we have 
gained nothing by all these changes. Do not 
say, 'So much the better, this is equality.' 
By no means: equality is not to be found here, 
any more than it is in England, or America, 
or anywhere, since it cannot exist. The conse- 
quence of attempting it is, that you will have 
bad silks, bad satins, bad velvets, and that is 
all. 

"The throne of fashion has encountered 
during the Revolution another throne, and it 
has been shattered in .consequence. The 
French people, amidst their dreams of equali- 
ty, have lost their own hands. The large and 
soft arm-chairs, the full and ample draperies, 
the cushions of eider down, all the other deli- 
cacies which we alone understood of all thi< 



36 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



European family, led only to the imprison- 
ment of their possessors ; and if you had the 
misfortune to inhabit a spacious hotel, within 
a court, to void the odious noise and smells 
of the street, you had your throat cut. That 
mode of treating elegant manners put them 
out of fashion ; they were speedily abandoned, 
and the barbarity of their successors still so 
lingers amongst us, that every day you see put 
into the lumber-room an elegant Grecian chair 
which has broken your arm, and canopies 
which smell of the stable, because they are 
stuffed with hay. 

"I growl because I am growing old. If I 
saw that the world was going the way it should, 
I would say nothing, and would perhaps adopt 
the custom of our politicians, which is, to em- 
brace the last revolution with alacrity, what- 
ever it may be. See how comfortable this is, 
say our young men, who espouse the cause 
of the last easy chair which their upholsterer 
has made for them, as of the last of the thirteen 
or fifteen constitutions which have been manu- 
factured for them during the last forty years. 
I will follow their example ; I will applaud 
every thing, even the new government of Louis 
Philippe ; though, it must be confessed, that to 
do so requires a strong disposition to see 
every thing in the most favourable colours." — 
I. 197, 198. 

The authoress apologizes frequently for 
these and similar passages, containing details 
on the manners, habits, and fashions during 
the period in which she lived ; but no excuse 
is required for their insertion. Details of ball- 
dresses, saloons, operas, and theatres, may 
appear extremely trifling to those who have 
only to cross the street to witness them; but 
they become very different when they are read 
after the lapse of centuries, and the accession 
of a totally different set of manners. They are 
the materials from which alone a graphic and 
interesting history of the period can be framed. 
What would we give for details of this sort 
on the era of Caesar and Pompey? with what 
eagerness do we turn to the faithful pages of 
Froissart and Monstrellet for similar informa- 
tion concerning the chivalrous ages ; and with 
what delight do we read the glowing pictures 
in Ivanhoe and the Crusaders, in Quentin 
Durward and Kenilworth, of the manners, 
customs, and habits of those periods'! To all 
appearance, the world is changing so rapidly 
under the pressure of the revolutionary tem- 
pest, that, before the lapse of many genera- 
tions, the habits of our times will be as much 
the object of research to the antiquary, and of 
interest to the historian, as those of Richard 
Coeur de Lion or the Black Prince are to our 
age. 

We have mentioned above, that Napoleon's 
interest in Madame Pennon appeared to have 
been stronger than that of mere friendship. 
The following passage contains the account 
of a declaration and refusal, which never pro- 
bably before were equalled since the beginning 
of the world : — 

"Napoleon came one day to my mother, a 
considerable time after the death of my father, 
and proposed a marriage between his sister 
Pauline and my brother Permon. 'Pennon 



has some fortune,' said he; { my sister has 
nothing: but I am in a situation to do much 
for my connections, and I could procure an 
advantageous place for her husband. That 
alliance would render me happy. You know 
how beautiful my sister is : My mother is 
your friend : Come, say Yes, and all will be 
settled.' 

" My mother answered, that her son must 
answer for himself; and that she would make 
no attempt to influence his choice. 

" Bonaparte admitted that my brother was 
a young man so remarkable, that, though he 
was only twenty-five years of age, he had 
judgment and talents adequate to any situa- 
tion. What Bonaparte proposed was extreme- 
ly natural. He contemplated a marriage be- 
tween a girl of sixteen and a young man of 
twenty-five, who had L.500 a year, with a 
handsome exterior; who drew as well as his 
master, Vernet; played on the harp much 
better than his master, Kromphultz ; spoke 
English, Italian, and modern Greek, as well as 
a native, and had such talents as had made 
his official duties in the army of the south a 
matter of remark. Such was the person whom 
Napoleon asked for his sister; a ravishing 
beauty and good daughter, it is true ; but that 
was all. 

"To this proposal Napoleon added another; 
that of a union between myself and Joseph or 
Jerome. 'Jerome is younger than Laurette,' 
said my mother, laughing. ' In truth, my dear 
Napoleon, you have become a high-priest to- 
day; you must needs marry all the world, even 
children.' Bonaparte laughed also, but with 
an embarrassed air. He admitted that that 
morning, in rising, a gale of marriage had 
blown over him, 'and to prove it,' said he, 
taking the hand of my mother, and kissing it, 
' I am resolved to commence the union of our 
families by asking you to marry myself as 
soon as the forms of society will permit.' 

" My mother has frequently told me that ex- 
traordinary scene, which I know as if I had 
been present at it. She looked at Bonaparte 
for some seconds with an astonishment bor- 
dering on stupefaction ; then she began to 
laugh so immoderately that we all heard it, 
though we were in the next room. 

"Napoleon was highly offended at the mode 
in which a proposal, which appeared to him 
perfectly natural, was received. My mother, 
who perceived what he felt, hastened to ex- 
plain herself, and to show that it was at the 
thoughts of the ridiculous figure which she 
herself would make in such an event, that she 
was so much amused. ' My dear Napoleon,' 
said she, when she had done laughing, 'let us 
speak seriously. You imagine you know my 
age, but you really do not : I will not tell you, 
for I have a slight weakness in that respect : 
I will only say, I am old enough, not only to 
be your mother, but the mother of Joseph. 
Let us put an end to this pleasantry; it 
grieves me when coming from you.' 

"Bonaparte told her that he was quite se- 
rious; that the age of his wife was to him a 
matter of no importance, provided she had not 
the look, like her, of being above thirty years 
old; that he had deliberately considered what 



NAPOLEON. 



37 



he had just said ; and he added these remark- 
able words : — ' I wish to marry. My friends 
wish me to marry a lady of the Fauxbourg St. 
Germain, who is charming and agreeable. My 
old friends are averse to this connection, and 
the one I now propose suits me better in many 
respects. Reflect.' My mother interrupted the 
conversation by saying, that her mind was 
made up as to herself; and that as to her son, 
she would give him an answer in a day or 
two. She gave him her hand at parting, and 
said, smiling, that, though she had not entirely 
given up the idea of conquests, she could not 
go just so far as to think of subduing a heart 
of six-and-twenty; and that she hoped their 
friendship would not be disturbed by this little 
incident. 'But at all events,' said Napoleon, 
'consider it well.' — 'Well, I will consider it,' 
said she, smiling in her sweetest manner, and 
so they parted. 

" After I was married to Junot, and he heard 
it, he declared that it appeared less surprising 
to him than it did to us. Bonaparte, at the 
epoch of the 13th Vendemiare, was attached 
to the war committee. His projects, his 
plans, all had one object, and that was the 
East. My mother's name of Oomnene, with 
her Grecian descent, had a great interest in 
his imagination. The name of Calomeros, 
united with Comnene, might have powerfully 
served his ambition in that quarter. ' The 
great secret of all these marriages,' said Junot, 
' was in that idea.' I believe he was right." — 
I. pp. 202, 203. 

All the proposed marriages came to nothing ; 
the duchess's brother refused Pauline, and she 
herself Joseph. They little thought, that the 
one was refusing the throne of Charlemagne, 
the other that of Charles V., and the third, the. 
most beautiful princess in Europe. 

The following picture of three of the most 
celebrated women in the Revolution, one of 
whom evidently contributed by her influence 
to the fall of Robespierre, shows that the fair 
authoress is not less a master of the subject 
more peculiarly belonging to her sex. 

" Madame D. arrived late in the ball-room. 
The great saloon was completely filled. Ma- 
dame D., who was well accustomed to such 
situations, looked around her to see if she 
could discover a seat, when her eyes were 
arrested by the figure of a young and charm- 
ing person, with a profusion of light tresses, 
looking around her with her fine blue eyes, 
with a timid air, and offering the most perfect 
image of a young sylph. She was in the act 
of being led to her seat by M. de Trenis, which 
showed that she was a beautiful dancer ; for 
he honoured no one with his hand, but those 
who might receive the title of la belle danscuse. 
The young lady, after having bowed blushing 
to the Vestris of the room, sat down beside a 
lady who had the appearance of being her 
elder sister, and whose extremely elegant dress 
was attracting the attention of all around her. 
'Who are these ladies V said Madame D. to 
the Count de Haulefort, on whose arm she 
was leaning. 'Do you not know the Vis- 
countess Beauharnais and her daughter Hor- 
tense?' 

" ' My God !' said the Count, ' who is that 



beautiful woman V who at that moment en- 
tered the room, and towards whom all eyes 
were immediately turned. That lady was 
of a stature above the ordinary; but the per- 
fect harmony in her proportions prevented 
you from perceiving that she was above the 
ordinary size. It was the Venus of the Capi- 
tol, but more beautiful than the work of Phi- 
dias. You saw the same perfection in the 
arms, neck, and feet, and the whole figure 
animated by an expression of benevolence, 
which told at once, that all that beauty was 
but the magic reflection of a mind animated 
only by the most benevolent and generous 
feelings. Her dress had no share in contri- 
buting to her beauty; for it was a simple 
robe of Indian muslin arranged in drapery 
like the antique, and held together on the 
shoulders by two splendid cameos ; a girdle 
of gold, which encircled her figure, was ele- 
gantly clasped in the same way; a large gold- 
en bracelet ornamented her arm; her hair, 
black and luxuriant, was dressed without 
tresses, « la Titus; over her white and beauti- 
ful shoulders was thrown a superb shawl of 
redcachemere, a dress at that period extremely 
rare, and highly in request. It was thrown 
round her in the most elegant and picturesque 
manner, forming thus a picture of the most 
ravishing beauty. It was Madame Tallien, so 
well known for her generous efforts at the 
time of the fall of Robespierre."— I. 222. 

This description suggests one observation, 
which must strike every one who is at all fami- 
liar with the numerous French female memoirs 
which have issued from the Parisian press 
within these few years. This is the extraor- 
dinary accuracy with which, at any distance 
of time, they seem to have the power of re- 
calling, not only the whole particulars of a 
ball-room or opera, but even the dresses worn 
by the ladies on these occasions. Thus the 
ball here described took place in 1797. Yet 
the duchess has no sort of difficulty in re- 
counting the whole particulars both of the 
people and dresses in 1830, thrce-and-thirty 
years after. We doubt extremely whether 
any woman in England could give as accu- 
rate an account within a month after the 
event. Nor does there seem to be any ground 
for the obvious remark that these descriptions 
are all got up ex post facto, without any foun- 
dation in real life ; for the variety and accu- 
racy with which they are given evidently 
demonstrates, that however much fhe colours 
may have been subsequently added, the out- 
lines of the sketch were taken from nature. 
As little is there any ground for the suspicion, 
that the attention of the French women is ex- 
clusively occupied with these matters, to the 
exclusion of more serious considerations; for 
these pages are full of able and sometime* 
profound remarks on politics, events, and 
characters, such as would have done credit tic 
the clearest head in Britain. We can only 
suppose that the vanity which, amidst many 
excellencies, is the undoubted characteristic 
both of the men and women in France, is the 
cause of this extraordinary power in their 
female writers, and that the same disposition 
which induces their statesmen and heroes to 
D 



38 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



record daily the victories of their diplomacy 
and arms, leads their lively and intelligent 
ladies to commit to paper all that is particu- 
larly remarkable in private life, or descriptive 
of their triumphs in the field of love. 

Some interesting details are preserved, as to 
the reception of Napoleon in Paris by the 
Directory after the Kevolution of the 18th 
Fructidor. The following quotations exhibit 
the talent of the author, both for the lighter 
and more serious subjects of narrative in the 
best light : 

" Junot entered at first into the famous bat- 
talion of volunteers of the Cote d'or. After 
the surrender of Longwy they were moved to 
Toulon ; it was the most terrific period of the 
Revolution. Junot was then a sergeant of 
grenadiers, an honour which he received from 
the voluntary election of his comrades on the 
field of battle. Often, in recounting to me the 
first years of his adventurous life, he has de- 
clared that nothing ever gave him such a de- 
lirium of joy, as when his comrades, all, he 
said, as brave as himself, named him sergeant 
on the field of battle, and he was elevated on 
a seat formed of crossed bayonets, still reek- 
ing with the blood of their enemies." 

It was at that time that, being one day, 
during the siege of Toulon, at his post at the 
battery of St. Culottes, an officer of artillery, 
who had recently come from Paris to direct 
the operations of the siege, asked from the 
officer who commanded the post for a young 
non-commissioned officer who had at once in- 
telligence and boldness. The officer immedi- 
ately called for Junot; the officer surveyed 
him with that eye which already began to take 
the measure of human capacity. 

" 'You will change your dress,' said the 
commander, 'and you will go there to bear 
this order.' He showed him with his hand a 
spot at a distance on the same side. The 
young sergeant blushed up to the eyes ; his 
eyes kindled with fire. 'I am not a spy,' said 
he, 'to execute their orders; seek another to 
bear them.' 'Do you refuse to obey !' said the 
superior officer ; 'do you know to what punish- 
ment you expose yourself in so doing V 'I 
am ready to obey,' said Junot, ' but 1 will go 
in my uniform, or not at all.' The comman- 
der smiled, and looked at him attentively. 
'But if you do, they will kill you.' 'What 
does that signify V said Junot; 'you know 
me little to imagine I would be pained at such 
an occurrence, and, as for me, it is all one — 
come, I go as I am ; is it not so V And he set 
off singing. 

" After he was gone, the superior officer 
asked, ' What is the name of that young man!' 
'Junot,' replied the other. The commanding 
officer then wrote his name in his pocket-book. 
' He will make his way,' he replied. This 
judgment was already of decisive importance 
to Junot, for the reader must readily have 
divined that the officer of artillery was Na- 
poleon. 

"A few days after, being on his rounds at 
the same battery, Bonaparte asked for some 
one who could write well. Junot stepped out 
of the ranks and presented himself. Bona- 
parte recognised him as the sergeant who had 



already fixed his attention. He expressed his 
satisfaction at seeing him, and desired him to 
place himself so as to write under his dicta- 
tion. Hardly was the letter done, when a 
bomb, projected from the English batteries, 
fell at the distance of ten yards, and, exploding, 
covered all present with gravel and dust. 
' Well,' said Junot, laughing, ' we shall at least 
not require sand to dry the ink.' 

" Bonaparte fixed his eyes on the young ser- 
geant ; he was calm, and had not even quivered 
at the explosion. That event decided his for- 
tune. He remained attached to the com- 
mander of artillery, and returned no more to 
his corps. At a subsequent time, when the 
town surrendered, and Bonaparte was ap- 
pointed General, Junot asked no other recom- 
pense for his brave conduct during the siege, 
but to be named his aid-de-camp. He and 
Muiron were the first who served him in that 
capacity." — I. 268. 

A singular incident, which is stated as hav- 
ing happened to Junot at the battle of Lonato, 
in Italy, is recorded in the following curious 
manner: — 

"The evening before the battle of Lonato, 
Junot having been on horseback all the day, 
and rode above 20 leagues in carrying the 
orders of the General-in-Chief, lay down over- 
whelmed with fatigue, without undressing, 
and ready to start up at the smallest signal. 
Hardly was he asleep, when he dreamed he 
was on a field of battle, surrounded by the 
dead and the dying. Before him was a horse- 
man, clad in armour, with whom he was en- 
gaged ; that cavalier, instead of a lance, was 
armed with a scythe, with which he struck 
Junot several blows, particularly one on the 
left temple. The combat was long, and at 
length they seized each other by the middle. 
In the struggle the vizor, the casque of the 
horseman, fell off, and Junot perceived that he 
was fighting with a skeleton ; soon the armour 
fell off, and death stood before him armed with 
his scythe. ' I have not been able to take you,' 
said he, 'but I will seize one of your best 
friends. — Beware of me !' 

" Junot awoke, bathed with sweat. The 
morning was beginning to dawn, and he could 
not sleep from the impression he had received. 
He felt convinced that one of his brother aid- 
de-camps, Muiron or Marmont, would be slain 
in the approaching fight. In effect it was so: 
Junot received two wounds — one on the left 
temple, which he bore to his grave, and the 
other on the breast; but Muiron was shot 
through the heart."— I. 270. 

The two last volumes of this interesting 
work, published a few weeks ago, are hardly 
equal in point of importance to those which 
contained the earlier history of Napoleon, but 
still they abound with interesting and curious 
details. The following picture of the religion 
which grew up in France on the ruins of 
Christianity, is singularly instructive: — 

" It is well known, that during the revolu- 
tionary troubles of France, not only all the 
churches were closed, but the Catholic and 
Protestant worship entirely forbidden; and, 
after the Constitution of 1795, it was at the 
hazard of one's life that either the mass was 



NAPOLEON. 



39 



beard, or any religious duty performed. It is 
evident that Robespierre, who unquestionably 
had a design which is now generally under- 
stood, was desirous, on the day of the fete of 
the Supreme Being, to bring back public 
opinion to the worship of the Deity. Eight 
months before, we had seen the Bishop of 
Paris, accompanied by his clergy, appear vo- 
luntarily at the bar of the Convention, to abjure 
the Christian faith and the Catholic religion. 
But it is not as generally known, that at that 
period Robespierre was not omnipotent, and 
could not carry his desires into effect. Nu- 
merous factions then disputed with him the 
supreme authority. It was not till the end of 
] 793, and the beginning of 1794, that his power 
was so completely established that he could 
venture to act up to his intentions. 

"Robespierre was then desirous to establish 
the worship of the Supreme Being, and the 
belief of the immortality of the soul. He felt 
that irreligion is the soul of anarchy, and it 
was not anarchy but despotism which he de- 
sired ; and yet the very day after that magnifi- 
cent fete in honour of the Supreme Being, a 
man of the highest celebrity in science, and 
as distinguished for virtue and probity as 
philosophic genius, Lavoisier, was led out to 
the scaffold. On the day following that, 
Madame Elizabeth, that princess whom the 
executioners could not guillotine, till they had 
turned aside their eyes from the sight of her 
angelic visage, stained the same axe with her 
blood ! — And a month after, Robespierre, who 
wished to restore order for his own purposes — 
who wished to still the bloody waves which for 
years had inundated the state, felt that all his 
efforts would be in vain if the masses who 
supported his power were not restrained and 
directed, because without order nothing but 
ravages and destruction can prevail. To en- 
sure the government of the masses, it was in- 
dispensable that morality, religion, and belief 
should be established — and, to affect the mul- 
titude, that religion should be clothed in ex- 
ternal forms. ' My friend,' said Voltaire, to 
the atheist Damilaville, 'after you have supped 
on well-dressed partridges, drank your spark- 
ling champagne, and slept on cushions of 
down in the arms of your mistress, I have no 
fear of you, though you do not believe in God. 
But if you are perishing of hunger, and I meet 
you in the corner of a wood, I would rather 
dispense with your company.' But when 
Robespierre wished to bring back to some- 
thing like discipline the crew of the vessel 
which was fast driving on the breakers, he 
found the thing was not so easy as he ima- 
gined. To destroy is easy — to rebuild is the 
difficulty. He was omnipotent to do evil; but 
the day that he gave the first sign of a disposi- 
tion to return to order, the hands which he 
himself had stained with blood, marked his 
forehead with the fatal sign of destruction." — 
VI. 34, 35. 

After the fall of Robespierre, a feeble attempt 
was made, under the Directory, to establish a 
religious system founded on pure Deism. To 
the faithful believer in Revelation, it is inte- 
resting to trace the rise and fall of the first 
attempt in the history of the world to es- 



tablish such a faith as the basis of national 
religion. 

" Under the Directory, that brief and deplora- 
ble government, a new sect established itself 
in France. Its system was rather morality 
than religion ; it affected the utmost tolerance, 
recognised all religions, and had no other faith 
than a belief in God. Its votaries were termed 
the Theophilanthropists. It was during the 
year 1797 that this sect arose. I was once 
tempted to go to one of their meetings. Lare- 
veilliere Lepaux, chief grand priest and pro- 
tector of the sect, was to deliver a discourse. 
The first thing that struck me in the place of 
assembly, was a basket filled with the most 
magnificent flowers of July, which was then 
the season, and another loaded with the most 
splendid fruits. Every one knows the grand 
altar of the church of St. Nicholas in the 
Fields, with its rich Corinthian freize. I sus- 
pect the Theophilanthropists had chosen that 
church on that account for the theatre of their 
exploits, in a spirit of religious coquetry. In 
truth, their basket of flowers produced an ad- 
m irable effect on that altar of the finest Grecian 
form, and mingled in perfect harmony with the 
figures of angels which adorned the walls. The 
chief pronounced a discourse, in which he 
spoke so well, that, in truth, if the Gospel had 
not said the same things infinitely better, some 
seventeen hundred and ninety-seven years be- 
fore, it would have been decidedly preferable 
either to the Paganism of antiquity, or the 
mythology of Egypt or India. 

" Napoleon had the strongest prejudice 
against that sect. ' They are comedians,' said 
he; and when some one replied that nothing 
could be more admirable than the conduct of 
some of their chiefs, that Lareveilliere Lepaux 
was one of the most virtuous men in Paris ; 
in fine, that their morality consisted in nothing 
but virtue, good faith, and charity, he replied — 

" ' To what purpose is all that? Every sys- 
tem of morality is admirable. Apart from 
certain dogmas, more or less absurd, w T hich 
were necessary to bring them down to the 
level of the age in which they w r ere produced, 
what do you see in the morality of the Wid- 
ham, the Koran, the Old Testament, or Confu- 
cius 1 Everywhere a pure system of morality, 
that is to say, you see protection to the weak, 
respect to the laws, gratitude to God, recom- 
mended and enforced. But the evangelists 
alone exhibit the union of all the principles of 
morality, detached from every kind of ab- 
surdity. There is something admirable, and 
not your common-place sentiments put into 
bad verse. Do you wish to see what is sub- 
lime, you and your friends the Theophilan- 
thropists ? Repeat the Lord's Prayer. Your zea- 
lots,' added he, addressing a young enthusiast 
in that system, 'are desirous of the palm of 
martyrdom, but I will not give it them ; nothing 
shall fall on them but strokes of ridicule, and 
I little know the French, if they do not prove 
mortal.' In truth, the result proved how well 
he had appreciated the French character. It 
perished after an ephemeral existence of five 
years, and left not a trace behind, but a few 
verses, preserved as a relic of that age of 
mental aberration."— VI. 40—43. 



40 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



This passage is very remarkable. Here we 
have the greatest intellect of the age, Napoleon 
himself, recurring to the Gospel, and to the 
Lord's Prayer, as the only pure system of re- 
ligion, and the sublimest effort of human com- 
position; and Robespierre endeavouring, in the 
close of his bloody career, to cement anew the 
fabric of society, which he had had so large a 
share in destroying, by a recurrence to reli- 
gious impressions! So indispensable is devo- 
tion to the human heart; so necessary is it to 
the construction of the first elements of society, 
and so well may you distinguish the spirit of 
anarchy and revolution, by the irreligious ten- 
dency which invariably attends it, and prepares 
the overthrow of every national institution, by 
sapping the foundation of every private virtue. 
The arrest of the British residents over all 
France, on the rupture of the peace of Amiens, 
was one of the most cruel and unjustifiable 
acts of Napoleon's government. The following 
scene between Junot and the First Consul on 
this subject, is singularly characteristic of the 
impetuous fits of passion to which that great 
man was subject, and which occasionally be- 
trayed him into actions so unworthy of his 
general character. 

" One morning, at five o'clock, when day was 
just beginning to break, an order arrived from 
the First Consul to repair instantly to Malmai- 
son. He had been labouring till four in the 
morning, and had but just fallen asleep. He 
set off instantly, and did not return till five in 
the evening. When he entered he was in great 
agitation; his meeting with him had been 
stormy, and the conversation long. 

" When Junot arrived at the First Consul's, 
he found his figure in disorder; his features 
were contracted; and every thing announced 
one of those terrible agitations which made 
every one who approached him tremble. 

" ' Junot,' said he to his old aid-de-camp, ' are 
you still the friend on whom I can rely ? Yes 
or no. No circumlocution.' 

" ' Yes, my General.' 

'"Well then, before an hour is over, you 
must take measures instantly, so that all the 
English, without one single exception, shall be 
instantly arrested. Room enough for them will 
be found in the Temple, the Force, the Abbaye, 
and the other prisons of Paris; it is indispen- 
sable that they should all be arrested. We 
must teach their government, that entrenched 
though they are in their isle, they can be reach- 
eel by an enemy who is under no obligation 
to treat their subjects with any delicacy. — The 
wretches,' said he, striking his fist violently on 
the table, 'they refuse Malta, and assign as a 

reason' Here his anger choked his voice, 

and he was some time in recovering himself. 
' They assign as a reason, that Lucien has in- 
fluenced, by my desire, the determinations of 
the Court of Spain, in regard to a reform of the 
Clergy; and they refuse to execute the Treaty 
of Amiens, on pretence that, since it was signed, 
the situation of the contracting parties had 
changed.' 

" Junot was overwhelmed ; but the cause of 
his consternation was not the rupture with 
England. It had been foreseen, and known for 
several days. But in the letters which were 



now handed to him he perceived a motive to 
authorize the terrible measure which Napoleon 
had commanded. He would willingly have 
given him his life, but now he was required to 
do a thing to the last degree repugnant to the 
liberal principles in which he had been trained. 

" The First Consul waited for some time for 
an answer; but seeing the attitude of Junot, he 
proceeded, after a pause of some minutes, as 
if the answer had already been given. 

" ' That measure must be executed at seven 
o'clock this evening. I am resolved that, this 
evening, not the most obscure theatre at Paris, 
not the most miserable restaurateur, should 
contain an Englishman within its walls.' 

"'My General,' replied Junot, who had now 
recovered his composure, ' you know not only 
my attachment to your person, but my devotion 
in every thing which regards yourself. Believe 
me, then, it is nothing but that devotion which 
makes me hesitate in obeying you, before en- 
treating you to take a few hours to reflect on 
the measure which you have commanded me 
to adopt.' 

" Napoleon contracted his eye-brows. 

" ' Again !' said he. ' What ! is the scene of 
the other day so soon to be renewed? Lannes 
and you truly give yourselves extraordinary 
license. Duroc alone, with his tranquil air, 
does not think himself entitled to preach ser- 
mons to me. You shall find, gentlemen, by 
God, that I can square my hat as well as any 
man ; Lannes has already experienced it ; and 
I do not think he will enjoy much his eating 
of oranges at Lisbon. As for you, Junot, do 
not rely too much on my friendship. The day 
on which I doubt of yours, mine is destroyed.' 

"'My General,' replied Junot, profoundly 
afflicted at being so much misunderstood, " it 
is not at the moment that I am giving you the 
strongest proof of my devotion, that you should 
thus address me. Ask my blood; ask my life; 
they belong to you, and shall be freely render- 
ed ; but to order me to do a thing which will 
cover us all with ' 

" ' Go on,' he interrupted, ' go on, by all 
means. What will happen to me because I 
retaliate on a perfidious government the inju- 
ries which it has heaped upon me?' 

'" It does not belong to me,' replied Junot, 
' to decide upon what line of conduct is suit- 
able to you. Of this, however, I am well as- 
sured, that if any thing unworthy of your glory 
is attempted, it will be from your eyes being 
fascinated by the men, who only disquiet you 
by their advice, and incessantly urge you to 
measures of severity. Believe me, my Gene- 
ral, these men do you infinite mischief.' 

" ' Who do you mean !' said Napoleon. 

"Junot mentioned the names of several, 
and stated what he knew of them. 

" ' Nevertheless, these men are devoted to 
me,' replied he. 'One of them said the other 
day, " If the First Consul were to desire me to 
kill my father, I would kill him."' 

'"I know not, my General,' replied Junot, 
' what degree of attachment to you it is, to sup- 
pose you capable of giving an order to a son 
to put to death his own father. But it matters 
not; when one is so unfortunate as to think in 
that manner, they seldom make it public' 



NAPOLEON. 



41 



" Two years afterwards, the First Consul, 
who was then Emperor, spoke to me of that 
scene, after my return from Portugal, and told 
me that he was on the point of embracing Ju- 
not at these words : so much was he struck 
with these noble expressions addressed to him, 
his general, his chief, the man on whom alone 
his destiny depended. ' For in fine,' said the 
Emperor, smiling, 'I must own I am rather 
unreasonable when I am angry, and that you 
know, Madame Junot.' 

" As for my husband, the conversation which 
he had with the First Consul was of the warm- 
est description. He went the length of remind- 
ing him, that at the departure of the ambassa- 
dor, Lord Whitworth, the most solemn assu- 
rances had been given him of the safety of all 
the English at Paris. 'There are,' said he, 
' amongst them, women, children, and old men ; 
there are numbers, my General, who night and 
morning pray to God to prolong your days. 
They are for the most part persons engaged in 
trade, for almost all the higher classes of that na- 
tion have left Paris. The damage they would 
sustain from being all imprisoned, is immense. 
Oh, my General ! it is not for you whose noble 
and generous mind so well comprehends what- 
ever is grand in the creation, to confound a 
generous nation with a perfidious cabinet' " — 
VI. 406—410. 

With the utmost difficulty, Junot prevailed 
on Napoleon to commute the original order, 
which had been for immediate imprisonment, 
into one for the confinement of the unfortu- 
nate British subjects in particular towns, where 
it is well known most of them lingered till de- 
livered by the Allies in 1814. But Napoleon 
never forgave this interference with his wrath; 
and shortly after, Junot was removed from the 
government of Paris, and sent into honourable 
exile to superintend the formation of a corps 
of grenadiers at Arras. 

The great change which has taken place in 
the national character of France since the Re- 
storation, has been noticed by all writers on 
the subject. The Duchess of Abrantes' obser- 
vations on the subject are highly curious. 

"Down to the year 1800, the national cha- 
racter had undergone no material alteration. 
That character overcame all perils, disregard- 
ed all dangers, and even laughed at death it- 
self, It was this calm in the victims of the 
Revolution which gave the executioners their 
principal advantage. A friend of my acquaint- 
ance, who accidentally found himself sur- 
rounded by the crowd who were returning from 
witnessing the execution of Madame du Barri, 
heard two of the women in the street speaking 
to each other on the subject, and one said to 
the other, 'How that one cried out! If they 
all cry out in that manner, I will not return 
again to the executions.' What a volume of 
reflections arise from these few words spoken, 
with all the unconcern of those barbarous 
days ! 

"The three years of the Revolution follow- 
ing 1793, taught us to weep, but did not teach 
us to cease to laugh. They laughed under the 
axe yet stained with blood ; — they laughed as 
the victim slept at Venice under the burning 
irons which were to waken his dreams. Alas ! 
6 



how deep must have been the wounds which 
have changed this lightsome character! For 
the joyous Frenchman laughs no more ; and 
if he still has some happy days, the sun of 
gaiety has set for ever. This change has taken 
place during the fifteen years which have fol- 
lowed the Restoration ; while the horrors of 
the wars of religion, the tyrannical reigns of 
Louis XI. and XIV., and even the bloody days 
of the Convention, produced no such effect." — 
V. 142. 

Like all the other writers on the modern 
state of France, of whatever school or party 
in politics, Madame Junot is horrified with the 
deterioration of manners, and increased vul- 
garity, which has arisen from the democratic 
invasions of later times. Listen to this ardent 
supporter of the revolutionary order of things, 
on this subject: — 

"At that time, (1801,) the habits of good 
company were not yet extinct in Paris; of the 
old company of France, and not of what is now 
termed good company, and which prevailed 
thirty years ago only among postilions and 
stable-boys. At that period, men of good birth 
did not smoke in the apartments of their -wives, be- 
cause they felt it to be a dirty and disgusting 
practice ; they generally washed their hands ; 
when they went out to dine, or to pass the 
evening in a house of their acquaintance, they 
bowed to the lady at its head in entering and retiring, 
and did not appear so abstracted in their 
thoughts as to behave as they would have 
done in an hotel. They were then careful not 
to turn their bark on those with whom they conversed, 
so as to show only an ear or the point of a 
nose to those whom they addressed. They 
spoke of something else, besides those eternal 
politics on which no two can ever agree, and 
which give occasion only to the interchange 
of bitter expressions. There has sprung from 
these endless disputes, disunion in families, 
the dissolution of the oldest friendships, and 
the growth of hatred which will continue till 
the grave. Experience proves that in these 
contests no one is ever convinced, and that 
each goes away more than ever persuaded of 
the truth of his own opinions. 

" The customs of the world now give me 
nothing but pain. From the bosom of the re- 
tirement where I have been secluded for these 
fifteen years, I can judge, without preposses- 
sion, of the extraordinary revolution in man- 
ners which has lately taken place. Old im- 
pressions are replaced, it is said, by new ones ; 
that is all. Are, then, the new ones superior! 
I cannot believe it. Morality itself is rapidly 
undergoing dissolution ; every character is con- 
taminated, and no one knows from whence 
the poison is inhaled. Young men now lounge 
away their evenings in the box of a theatre, or 
the Boulevards, or carry on elegant conversa- 
tion with a fair seller of gloves and perfumery, 
make compliments on her lily and vermilion 
cheeks, and present her with a cheap ring, ac- 
companied with a gross and indelicate compli- 
ment. Society is so disunited, that it is daily 
becoming more vulgar, in the literal sense of 
the word. Whence any improvement is to 
arise, God only knows." — V. 156, 157. 

While we are concluding these observations 

1)2 



42 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



another bloody revolt has occurred at Paris ; 
the three glorious days of June have come to 
crown the work, and develope the consequences 
of the three glorious days of July.* After a 
desperate struggle, maintained with much 
greater resolution and vigour on the part of 
the insurgents than the insurrection which 
proved fatal to Charles X. ; after Paris having 
been the theatre, for three days, of bloodshed 
and devastation ; after 75,000 men had been 
engaged against the Revolutionists; after the 
thunder of artillery had broken down the Re- 
publican barricades, and showers of grape- 
shot had thinned the ranks of the citizen-sol- 
diers, the military force triumphed, and peace 
was restored to the trembling city. What has 
been the consequence 1 All the forms of law 
have been suspended ; military commissions 
established ; domiciliary visits become univer- 
sal ; several thousand persons thrown into 
prison ; and, before this, the fusillades of the 
new heroes of the Barricades have announced 
to a suffering country that the punishment of 
their sins has commenced. The liberty of the 
press is destroyed, the editors delivered over 
to military commissions, the printing presses 
of the opposition journals thrown into the 
Seine, and all attempts at insurrection, or 
words tending to excite it, and all offences of the 
pi-ess tending to excite dissatisfaction or revolt, 
handed over to military commissions, com- 
posed exclusively of officers ! This is the 
freedom which the three glorious days have 
procured for France ! 

The soldiers were desperately chagrined and 
mortified at the result of the three days of July; 
and well they might be so, as all the sub- 



sequent sufferings of their country, and the 
total extinction of their liberties on the last 
occasion, were owing to their vacillation in 
the first revolt. They have now fought with 
the utmost fury against the people, as they did 
at Lyons, and French blood has amply stained 
their bayonets; but it has come too late to 
wash out the stain of their former treason, or 
revive the liberties which it lost for their 
country. 

Polignac is now completely justified for all 
but the incapacity of commencing a change 
of the constitution with 5000 men, four pieces 
of cannon, and eight rounds of grape-shot to 
support it. The ordinances of Charles X., now 
adopted with increased severity by Louis Phi- 
lippe, were destined to accomplish, without 
bloodshed, that change which the fury of de- 
mocracy rendered necessary, and without 
which it has been found the Throne of the 
Barricades cannot exist. It is evident that 
the French do not know what freedom is. They 
had it under the Bourbons, as our people had 
it under the old constitution; but it would not 
content them, because it was not liberty, but 
power, not freedom, but democracy, not ex- 
emption from tyranny, but the power of tyran- 
nizing over others, that they desired. They 
gained their point, they accomplished their 
wishes, — and the consequence has been, two 
years of suffering, followed by military des- 
potism. We always predicted the three glori- 
ous days would lead to this result; but the 
termination of the drama has come more 
rapidly than the history of the first Revolution 
led us to anticipate. 



B0SSUET. 



To those who study only the writers of a 
particular period, or have been deeply im- 
mersed in the literature of a certain age, it is 
almost incredible how great a change is to be 
found in the human mind as it there appears, 
as compared with distant times, and how much 
even the greatest intellects are governed by 
the circumstances in which they arise, and 
the prevailing tone of the public mind with 
which they are surrounded. How much so- 
ever we may ascribe, and sometimes with 
justice ascribe, to the force and ascendant of 
individual genius, nothing is more certain 
than that, in the general case, it is external 
events and circumstances which give a certain 
bent to human speculation, and that the most 
original thought is rarely able to do much 
more than anticipate by a few years, the simul- 
taneous efforts of inferior intellects. Gene- 
rally, it will be found that particular seasons 
or periods in the great year of nations or of 
the world, bring forth their own appropriate 



* Written on the day when the accounts of the defeat 
of the great Revolt at the Cloister of Silleri by Louis 
Philippe and Marshal Soult were received. 



fruits : it is rarely that in June can be matured 
those of September. The changes which have 
made the greatest and most lasting alteration 
on the progress of science or the march of 
human affairs — printing, gunpowder, steam 
navigation — were brought to light, it is hardly 
known how, and by several different persons, 
so nearly at the same time, that it is difficult 
to say to whom the palm of original invention 
is to be awarded. The discovery of fluxions, 
awarded by common consent to the unap- 
proachable intellect of Newton, was made 
about the same time by his contemporaries, 
Leibnitz and Gregory; the honours of original 
thought in political economy are divided be- 
tween Adam Smith and the French economists ; 
the improvements on the steam-engine were 
made in the same age by Watt and Arkwright; 
and the science of strategy was developed 
with equal clearness in the German treatise 
of the Archduke Charles, as the contemporary 
treatises of Jomini and Napoleon. The great- 
est intellect perceives only the coming light; 
the rays of the rising sun strike first upon the 
summits of the mountains, but his ascending 



BOSSUET. 



43 



beams will soon illuminate the slopes on their 
sides, and the valleys at their feet. 

There is, however, a considerable variety 
in the rapidity with which the novel and ori- 
ginal ideas of different great men are com- 
municated to their contemporaries ; and hence 
the extraordinary difference between the early 
celebrity which some works, destined for future 
immortality, have obtained in comparison of 
others. This has long been matter of familiar 
observation to all persons at all acquainted 
with literary history. The works of some great 
men have at once stepped into that celebrity 
which was their destined meed through every 
subsequent age of the world, while the pro- 
ductions of others have languished on through 
a long period of obscurity, unnoticed by all 
save a few elevated minds, till the period 
arrived when the world became capable of 
understanding their truth, or feeling their 
beauty. The tomb of Euripides, at Athens, 
bore that all Greece mourned at his obsequies. 
We learn from Pliny's Epistles, that even in 
his own lifetime, immortality was anticipated 
not only for Tacitus, but all who were noticed 
in his annals. Shakspeare, though not yet 
arrived at the full maturity of his fame, was 
yet well known to, and enthusiastically ad- 
mired by his contemporaries. Lope de Vega 
amassed a hundred thousand crowns in the 
sixteenth century, by the sale of his eighteen 
hundred plays. Gibbon's early volumes ob- 
tained a celebrity in the outset nearly as great 
as his elaborate and fascinating work has 
since attained. In the next generation after 
Adam Smith, his principles were generally 
embraced, and largely acted upon by the legis- 
lature. The first edition of Robertson's Scot- 
land sold off in a month ; and Sir Walter Scott, 
by the sale of his novels and poems, was able, 
in twenty years, besides entertaining all the 
literary society of Europe, to purchase the 
large estate, and rear the princely fabric, 
library, and armory of Abbotsford. 

Instances, on the other hand, exist in equal 
number, and perhaps of a still more striking 
character, in which the greatest and most pro- 
found works which the human mind has ever 
produced have remained, often for a long time, 
unnoticed, till the progress of social affairs 
brought the views of others generally to a level 
with that of their authors. Bacon bequeathed 
his reputation in his last testament to the ge- 
neration after the next; so clearly did he per- 
ceive that more than one race of men must 
expire before the opinions of others attained 
the level of his own far-seeing sagacity. Burke 
advanced principles in his French Revolution 
of which we are now, only now, beginning, 
after the lapse of half a century, to feel the full 
truth and importance. Hume met with so 
little encouragement in the earlier volumes of 
nis history, that but for the animating assu- 
rances of a few enlightened friends, he has him- 
self told us, he would have resigned his task 
in despair. Milton sold the Paradise Lost for 
five pounds, and that immortal work languished 
on with a very limited sale till, fifty years after- 
wards, it was brought into light by the criti- 
cisms of Addison. Campbell for years could 
not find a bookseller who would buy the Plea- 



sures of Hope. Coleridge and Wordsworth 
passed for little better than imaginative illu- 
minati with the great bulk of their contempo- 
raries. 

The principle which seems to regulate this 
remarkable difference is this : Where a work 
of genius either describes manners, characters, 
or scenes with which the great bulk of man- 
kind are familiar, or concerning which they 
are generally desirous of obtaining informa- 
tion ; or if it advance principles which, based 
on the doctrines popular with the multitude, 
lead them to new and agreeable results, or 
deduces from them conclusions slightly in 
advance of the opinions of the age, but lying 
in the same direction, it is almost sure of 
meeting with immediate popularity. Where, 
on the other hand, it is founded on principles 
which are adverse to the prevailing current of 
public opinion — where it sternly asserts the 
great principles of religion and morality, in 
opposition to the prejudices or passions of a 
corrupted age — when it advocates the neces- 
sity of a rational and conservative govern- 
ment, in the midst of the fervor of innovation 
or the passion of revolution — when it stigma- 
tizes present vices, or reprobates present 
follies, or portrays the consequences of present 
iniquity — when "it appeals to feelings and vir- 
tues which have passed from the breasts of the 
present generation — the chances are that it 
will meet with present admiration only from a 
few enlightened or virtuous men, and that a 
different generation must arise, possibly a new 
race of mankind become dominant, before it 
attains that general popularity which is its 
destined and certain reward. On this account 
the chances are much against the survivance, 
for any considerable period, of any work, 
either on religion, politics, or morals, which 
has early attained to a very great celebrity, 
because the fact of its having done so is, in 
general, evidence of its having fallen in, to an 
extent inconsistent with truth, with the pre- 
vailing opinions and prejudices of the age. In 
such opinions there is almost always a consi- 
derable foundation of truth, but as commonly 
a large intermixture of error. Principles are, 
by the irreflecting mass, in general pushed too 
far ; due weight is not given to the considera- 
tions on the other side ; the concurring influ- 
ence of other causes is either overlooked or 
disregarded. This is more particularly the 
case with periods of general excitement, whe- 
ther on religious or political subjects, inso- 
much that there is hardly an instance of works 
which attained an early and extraordinary 
celebrity at such eras having survived the 
fervour which gave them birth, and the gene- 
ral concurrence of opinion in which they were 
cradled. Where are now the innumerable 
polemical writings which issued both from the 
Catholic and Protestant divines during the 
fervour of the Reformation 1 Where the forty 
thousand tracts which convulsed the nation in 
the course of the great Rebellion ? Where 
the deluge of enthusiasm and infidelity which 
overspread the world at the commencement 
of the French Revolution! On the other 
hand, the works which have survived such 
periods of general fervour are those whose 



44 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



authors boldly and firmly, resting on the in- 
ternal conviction of truth, set themselves to 
oppose the prevailing vices or follies of their 
age, and whose works, in consequence little 
esteemed by their contemporaries, have now 
risen into the purer regions of the moral at- 
mosphere, and now shine, far above the 
changes of mortality, as fixed stars in the 
highest heavens. Of this character is Bacon, 
whose sublime intellect, bursting the fetters 
of a narrow-minded age, outstripped by two 
centuries the progress of the human mind — 
Jeremy Taylor, whose ardent soul, loathing 
the vices of his corrupted contemporaries, 
clothed the lessons of religion in the burning 
words of genius — and Burke, whose earlier 
career, chained in the fetters of party, has now 
been forgotten in the lustre of the original and 
independent thoughts, adverse to the spirit of 
the age, which burst forth in his works on the 
French Revolution. 

In comparing, on subjects of political thought 
or social amelioration, the writings of the school 
of Louis XIV. with that of the Revolution, the 
progress of the human mind appears prodi- 
gious — and so it will speedily appear from the 
quotations which we shall lay before our 
readers. But, in the general comparison of 
the two, there is one thing very remarkable, 
and which is exactly the reverse of what might 
a priori have been expected, and what the ig- 
norant vulgar or party writers still suppose to 
be the case — this is the superior independence 
of thought, and bold declamation against the 
vices of the ruling power in the state, which 
the divines and moralists of the Grande Mo- 
narque exhibit, when compared with the cring- 
ing servility and oriental flattery which the 
writers of the Revolutionary school, whether 
in France or England, have never ceased to 
address to their democratic patrons and rulers 
invested with supreme authority. We need 
not remind our readers what is the language, 
even of able writers and profound thinkers of 
the modern democratic school, in regard to the 
sources of all abuse in government, and the 
quarter from whence alone any social im- 
provement can be expected. It is kings and 
aristocrats who are the origin of all oppres- 
sion and unhappiness; it is their abuses and 
misgovernment which have ever been the real 
causes of public suffering; it is their insatia- 
ble avarice, rapacity, and selfishness which 
have in every age brought misery and desola- 
tion upon the humbler and more virtuous 
members of society. Where, then, is ameliora- 
tion to be looked fori and in what class of 
society is an antidote to be found to the in- 
herent vices and abuses of power] In the 
middle and lower ranks; — it is their virtue, 
intelligence, and patriotism which is the real 
spring of all public prosperity — it is their un-. 
ceasing labour and industry which is the 
source of all public wealth — their unshaken 
constancy and courage which is at once the 
only durable foundation of national safety, and 
the prolific fountain of national glory. Princes 
may err, ministers may commit injustice ; but 
the people, when once enlightened by educa- 
tion, and intrusted with power, are never 
wrong—the masses never mistake their real 



interests : their interests are on the side of 
good government — of them it may truly be 
said, Vox populi, vox Dei. Such is the language 
which the democratic flatterers of these times 
incessantly address to the popular rulers of the 
state — to the masses by whom popularity and 
eminence is to be won — to the Government by 
whom patronage and power is distributed. 
From such degrading specimens of general 
servility and business, let us refresh our eyes, 
and redeem the honour of human nature, by 
turning to the thundering strains in which 
Bossuet and Fenelon impressed upon their 
courtly auditory and despotic ruler, the eternal 
doctrines of judgment to come, and the stern 
manner in which they traced to the vices or 
follies of princes the greater part of the evils 
which disturb the world. 

It is thus that Fenelon, in the name of Men- 
tor, addresses his royal pupil, the heir of the 
French monarchy: — 

"A king is much less acquainted than pri 
vate individuals with those by whom he is 
surrounded; every one around him has a 
mask on his visage ; every species of artifice 
is exhausted to deceive him — alas ! Tele- 
maque ! you will soon experience this too bit- 
terly. The more extensive the kingdom is 
which you have to govern, the more do you 
stand in need of ministers to assist you in 
your labours, and the more are you exposed 
to the chances of misrepresentation. The ob- 
scurity of private life throws a veil over our 
faults, and magnifies the idea of the powers of 
men; but supreme authority puts the virtues 
to the test, and unveils even the most incon- 
siderable failing; — grandeur is like the glasses 
which magnify all the objects seen through 
them. The whole world is occupied by ob- 
serving a single man, flattering his virtues, 
applauding his vices in his presence, execrat- 
ing them in his absence. Meanwhile, the 
king is but a man ; beset by all the humours, pas- 
sions, and weaknesses of mortality ; surrounded by 
artful flatterers, who have all their objects to 
gain in leading him into vices. Hardly has 
he redeemed one fault, when he falls into 
another; such is the situation even of the 
most enlightened and virtuous kings; what 
then must be the destiny of those who are de- 
praved? 

" The longest and best reigns are frequently 
too short to repair the mischief done, and often 
without intending it at their commencement. 
Royalty is born the heir to all these miseries; 
human weakness often sinks under the load 
by which it is oppressed. Men are to be pitied 
for being placed under the government of one 
as weak and fallible as themselves ; the gods 
alone would be adequate to the due regulation 
of human affairs. Nor are kings less to be 
pitied, being but men ; that is to say, imperfect 
and fallible beings, and charged with the go- 
vernment of an innumerable multitude of cor- 
rupted and deceitful men. 

" The countries in which the authority of the 
sovereign is most absolute, are precisely those 
in which they enjoy least real power. They 
take, they raise every thing ; they alone pos- 
sess the state ; but meanwhile every class of 
society languishes, the fields are deserted, cities 



BOSSUET. 



45 



decline, commerce disappears. The king, who 
cannot engross in his own person the whole 
state, and who cannot increase in grandeur, 
but with the prosperity of his people, annihi- 
lates himself by degrees by the decay of riches 
and power in his subjects. His dominions 
become bereaved both of wealth and men ; the 
last decline is irreparable. His absolute power 
indeed gives him as many slaves as he has 
subjects ; he is nattered, adored, and his 
slightest wish is a law; every one around him 
trembles ; but wait till the slightest revolution 
arrives, and that monstrous power, pushed to 
an extravagant excess, cannot endure; it has 
no foundation in the affections of the people ; 
it has irritated all the members of the state, 
and constrained them all to sigh after a change. 
At the first stroke which it receives, the idol 
is overturned, broken, and trampled under foot. 
Contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust, in 
a word, all the passions conspire against so 
odious an authority. The king who, in his 
vain prosperity, never found a single man suf- 
ficiently bold to tell him the truth, will not find 
in his misfortune a single person either to ex- 
tenuate his faults or defend him against his 
enemies." — Telemaquc, liv. xii. ad Jin. 

Passages similar to this abound in all the 
great ecclesiastical writers of the age of Louis 
XIV. and Louis XV. They are to be found 
profusely scattered through the works of Bos- 
sUet, Massilon, Fenelon, and Bourdaloue. We 
have many similar passages marked, but the 
pressure of other matters more immediately 
connected with the object of this paper pre- 
cludes their insertion. Now this independence 
and boldness of thought and expression, in 
courtly churchmen, and addressed to a courtly 
auditory, is extremely remarkable. It was to 
the Grande Monarque and his numerous train 
of princes, dukes, peeresses, ladies, and cour- 
tiers, that these eternal, but unpalatable truths 
were addressed ; it was the holders of all the 
church patronage of France, that were thus 
reminded of the inevitable result of misgo- 
vernment on the part of the ruling power. We 
speak much about the increasing intelligence, 
spirit, and independence of the age ; neverthe- 
less we should like to see the same masculine 
cast of thought, the same caustic severity of 
expression applied to the vices and follies of 
the present holders of power by the expectants 
of their bounty, as was thus fearlessly rung 
into the ears of the despotic rulers of France 
by the titled hierarchy who had been raised to 
greatness by their support. We should like 
to see a candidate for popular suffrage on the 
hustings condemn, in equally unmeasured 
terms, the vices, follies, and passions of the 
people ; or a leading orator on the liberal side, 
portray in as vivid colours, from the Ministe- 
rial benches in the House of Commons, the 
inevitable consequences of democratic selfish- 
ness and injustice; or a favourite preacher on 
the Voluntary system, thunder, in no less for- 
cible language, in the ears of his astonished 
audience, the natural results of fervour and 
intrigue among popular constituencies. Alas ! 
we see none of these things; truth, which did 
venture to make itself heard, when sanctified 
by the Church, in the halls of princes, is ut- 



terly banished from the precincts of the many- 
headed despots ; and religion, which loudly 
proclaimed the universal corruption and weak- 
ness of humanity in the ears of monarchs, can- 
not summon up sufficient courage to meet, in 
their strongholds of power, the equally de- 
praved and selfish masses of the people. 
Aristotle has said that the courtier and the 
demagogue are not only nearly allied to each 
other, but are in fact the same men, varying not 
in their object, but in the quarter to which, 
according to the frame of government, they 
address their flattery; but this remarkable fact 
would seem to demonstrate that the latter is a 
more thorough and servile courtier than the 
former; and that truth will more rarely be 
found in the assemblies of the multitude than 
in the halls of princes. 

In truth, the boldness and indignation of 
language conspicuous in the great ornaments 
of the French Church would be altogether in- 
explicable on merely worldly considerations ; 
and accordingly it will never be found among 
the irreligious and selfish flatterers of demo- 
cracy. It is religion alone, which, inspiring 
men with objects and a sense of duty above 
this world, can lead to that contempt of pre- 
sent danger, and that fearless assertion of 
eternal truth, in the presence of power, which 
has formed in every age the noblest attribute 
of the Christian Church. In the temporal 
courtiers of no age or country has there ever 
been found an example of the same courage- 
ous maintenance of principle and castigation 
of crime in defiance of the frowns of authority ; 
these worldly aspirants have ever been as 
servile and submissive to kings as the syco- 
phantish flatterers of a democratic multitude 
have been lavish in the praise of their in- 
tellectual wisdom. And the principle which 
rendered Bossuet and Fenelon the courageous 
assertors of eternal truth in the chapels and 
court of the Grand Monarque, was the same 
as that which inspired Latimer, the martyr of 
the English Church, with such heroic firm- 
ness in resisting the tyrannic injustice of 
Henry VIII. In the midst of the passions and 
cruelty of that blood-stained tyrant, the up- 
right prelate preached a sermon in his pre- 
sence at the Chapel-Royal, condemning, in the 
strongest terms, the very crimes to which 
every one knew the monarch was peculiarly 
addicted. Enraged beyond measure at the re- 
buke thus openly administered to his "plea- 
sant vices," Henry sent for Latimer, and 
threatened him with instant death if he did 
not on the next occasion retract all his cen- 
sures as openly as he had made them. The 
reproof got wind, and on the next Sunday the 
Royal Chapel was crowded with the courtiers, 
eager to hear the terms in which the inflexi- 
ble prelate was to recant his censures on the 
voluptuous tyrant. But Latimer ascended the 
pulpit, and after a long pause, fixing his eyes 
steadily on Henry, exclaimed, in the quaint 
language of the time, to which its inherent 
dignity has communicated eloquence — " Be- 
think thee, Hugh Latimer! that thou art in 
the presence of thy worldly sovereign, who 
hath power to terminate thy earthly life, and 
cast all thy worldly goods into the flames : But 



46 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



bethink thee also, Hugh Latimer! that thou 
art in the presence of thy Heavenly Father, 
whose right hand is mighty to destroy as to 
save, and who can cast thy soul into hell fire ;" 
and immediately began, in terms even severer 
and more cutting than before, to castigate the 
favourite vices and crimes of his indignant 
sovereign. The issue of the tale was different 
from what the cruel character of the tyrant 
might have led us to expect. Henry, who, 
with all his atrocity, was not on some occa- 
sions destitute of generous sentiments, was 
penetrated by the heroic constancy of the 
venerable prelate, and instead of loading him 
with chains, and sending him, as every one 
expected, to the scaffold, openly expressed his 
admiration of his courage, and took him more 
into favour than ever. 

The philosophical work of Bossuet, which 
has attained to most general celebrity, is his 
" Histoire Universelle ;" and Chateaubriand 
has repeatedly, in his later writings, held it up 
as an unequalled model of religious general- 
ization. We cannot concur in these eulogiums ; 
and in nothing perhaps does the vast progress 
of the human mind, during the last hundred 
and fifty years, appear more conspicuous than 
in comparing this celebrated treatise with the 
works on similar subjects of many men of in- 
ferior intellects in later times. The design of 
the work was grand and imposing; nothing 
less than a sketch of the divine government 
of the world in past ages, and an elucidation 
of the hidden designs of Providence in all the 
past revolutions of mankind. In this magnifi- 
cent attempt he has exhibited a surprising 
extent of erudition, and cast over the com- 
plicated thread of human affairs the eagle 
glance of genius and piety ; but he has not, in 
our humble apprehension, caught the spirit, 
or traced the real thread of divine administra- 
tion. He was too deeply read in the Old Testa- 
ment, too strongly imbued with the Fathers of 
the Church, to apprehend the manner in which 
Supreme Wisdom, without any special or mi- 
raculous interposition, works out the moral 
government of the world, and develops the 
objects of eternal foresight by the agency of 
human passions, virtues, and vices. His His- 
toric Theology is all tinged with the character 
of the Old Testament; it is the God of Battles 
whom he ever sees giving the victory to His 
chosen ; it is His Almighty Arm which he dis- 
cerns operating directly in the rise and the fall 
of nations. Voltaire said with truth that his 
" Universal History" is little more than the 
History of the Jews. It was reserved for a 
future age to discern, in the complicated thread 
of human affairs, the operation not less certain, 
but more impartial, of general laws ; to see in 
human passions the moving springs of social 
improvement, and the hidden instruments of 
human punishment; to discern, in the rise 
and fall of nations, the operation, not so much 
of the active interposilion, as of the general 
tendency of Divine power; and in the efforts 
which the wicked make for their own aggran- 
dizement, or the scope which they afford to 
their own passions, the certain causes of ap- 
proaching retribution. That Providence ex- 
ercises an unceasing superintendence of 



human affairs, and that the consequences of 
public actions are subjected to permanent 
laws, the tendency of which in national, as in 
private life, is to make the virtues or vices of 
men as instruments of their own reward or 
punishment, is obvious upon the most cursory 
survey of history, as well as private life; and 
though it cannot be affirmed that the sequence 
is invariable, yet it is sufficiently frequent to 
warrant certain inferences as to the general 
character of the laws. We cannot affirm that 
every day in summer is to be warm, and every 
day in winter cold; but nevertheless, the gen- 
eral character of those periods is such as to 
warrant the conclusion that the rotation of the 
season was intended, and in general does pro- 
duce that variation on temperature, and the 
consequent checking and development of the 
fruits of the earth. But, as far as Ave can dis- 
cern, the intentions of the Supreme Being are 
here, as elsewhere, manifested by general laws ; 
the agents employed are the virtues, vices, and 
passions of men ; and the general plan of 
divine administration is to be gathered rather 
from an attentive consideration of the experi- 
enced consequences of human actions, than 
any occasional interposition to check or sus- 
pend the natural course of events. 

As a specimen of the mode in which Bossuet 
regards the course of events, we subjoin the 
concluding passage of his Universal History : 
— "This long chain of causes and effects, on 
which the fate of empires depends, springs at 
once from the secrets of Divine Providence. 
God holds on high the balance of all kingdoms 
— all hearts are in his hands ; sometimes he 
lets loose the passions — sometimes he re- 
strains them; by these means he moves the 
whole human race. Does he wish to raise up 
a conqueror — he spreads terror before his 
arms, and inspires his soldiers with invincible 
courage. Does he wish to raise up legislators 
— he pours into their minds the spirit of fore- 
sight and wisdom. He causes them to fore- 
see the evils which menace the state, and lay 
deep in wisdom the foundations of public tran- 
quillity. He knows that human intellect is 
ever contracted in some particulars. He then 
draws the film from its eyes, extends its views, 
and afterwards abandons it to itself — blinds it, 
precipitates it to destruction. Its precautions 
become the snare which entraps ; its foresight 
the subtlety which destroys it. It is in this 
way that God exercises his redoubtable judg- 
ments according to the immutable laws of 
eternal justice. It is his invisible hand which 
prepares effects in their most remote causes, 
and strikes the fatal blows, the very rebound 
of which involves nations in destruction. 
When he wishes to pour out the vials of his 
wrath, and overturn empires, all becomes 
weak and vacillating in their conduct. Egypt, 
once so wise, became intoxicated, and faltered 
at every step, because the Most High had 
poured the spirit of madness into its counsels. 
It no longer knew what step to take; it 
faltered, it perished. But let us not deceive 
ourselves ; God can restore when he pleases the 
blinded vision; and he who insulted the blind- 
ness of others, himself falls into the most pro- 
found darkness, without any other cause being 



BOSSUET. 



47 



carried into operation to overthrow the longest 
course of prosperity. 

" It is thus that God reigns over all people. 
Let us no longer speak of hazard or fortune, 
or speak of it only as a veil to our weakness — 
an excuse to our ignorance. That which ap- 
pears chance to our uncertain vision is the 
effect of intelligence and design on the part of 
the Most High — of the deliberations of that 
Supreme Council which disposes of all human 
affairs. 

"It is for this reason that the rulers of man- 
kind are ever subjected to a superior force 
which they cannot control. Their actions pro- 
duce greater or lesser effects than they in- 
tended; their counsels have never failed to be 
attended by unforeseen consequences. Neither 
could they control the effect which the conse- 
quences of former revolutions produced upon 
their actions, nor foresee the course of events 
destined to follow the measures in which they 
themselves were actors. He alone who held 
the thread of human affairs — who knows what 
was, and is, and is to come — foresaw and pre- 
destined the whole in his immutable council. 

"Alexander, in his mighty conquests, in- 
tended neither to labour for his generals, nor 
to ruin his royal house by his conquests. 
When the elder Brutus inspired the Roman 
people with an unbounded passion for free- 
dom, he little thought that he was implanting 
in their minds the seeds of that unbridled li- 
cense, destined one day to induce a tyranny 
more grievous than that of the Tarquins. 
When the Caesars nattered the soldiers with a 
view to their immediate elevation, they had no 
intention of rearing up a militia of tyrants for 
their successors and the empire. In a word, 
there is no human power which has not con- 
tributed, in spite of itself, to other designs than 
its own. God alone is able to reduce all things 
to his own will. Hence it is that every thing 
appears surprising when we regard only secon- 
dary causes ; and, nevertheless, all things ad- 
vance with a regulated pace. Innumerable 
unforeseen results of human councils con- 
ducted the fortunes of Rome from Romulus 
to Charlemagne." — Discours sur VHitt. Univ. 
ad fin. 

It is impossible to dispute the grandeur of 
the glance which the Eagle of Meaux has cast 
over human affairs in the ancient world. But 
without contesting many of his propositions, 
and, in particular, fully conceding the truth of 
the important observation, that almost all the 
greater public actions of men have been at- 
tended in the end by consequences different 
from, often the reverse of, those which they 
intended, we apprehend that the mode of Di- 
vine superintendence and agency will be found 
to be more correctly portrayed in the following 
passage from Blair — an author, the elegance 
and simplicity of whose diction frequently dis- 
guises the profoundness of his thoughts, and 
the correctness of his observations of human 
affairs : — " The system upon which the Divine 
Government at present proceeds plainly is, 
that men's own weakness should be appointed 
to correct them ; that sinners should be snared 
in the work of their own hand, and sunk in 
the pit which themselves have digged ; that the 



backslider in heart should be filled with his 
own ways. Of all the plans which could be 
devised for the government of the world, this 
approves itself to reason as the wisest and 
most worthy of God ; so to frame the constitu- 
tion of things, that the Divine laws should in 
a manner execute the?nsdves, and carry their 
sanctions in their own bosom. When the 
vices of men require punishment to be in- 
flicted, the Almighty is at no loss for ministers 
of justice. A thousand instruments of ven- 
geance are at his command; innumerable 
arrows are always in his quiver. But such is 
the profound wisdom of his plan, that no pe- 
culiar interposals of power are requisite. He 
has no occasion to step from his throne, and 
to interrupt the order of nature. With the 
majesty and solemnity which befits Omnipo- 
tence, he pronounces, 'Ephraim has gone to 
his idols : let him alone.' He leaves trans- 
gressors to their own guilt, and punishment 
follows of course. Their sins do the work of 
justice. They lift the scourge ; and with every 
stroke which they inflict on the criminal, they 
mix this severe admonition, that as he is only 
reaping the fruit of his own actions, he de- 
serves all that he suffers." — Blair, iv. 268, 
Scrm. 14. 

The most eloquent and original of Bossuet's 
writings is his funeral oration on Henrietta, 
Queen of England, wife of the unfortunate 
Charles I. It was natural that such an occa- 
sion should call forth all his powers, pro- 
nounced as it was on a princess of the blood- 
royal of France, who had undergone unpa- 
ralleled calamities with heroic resignation, the 
fruit of the great religious revolution of the 
age, against which the French prelate had 
exerted all the force of his talents. It exhibits 
accordingly a splendid specimen of genius 
and capacity; and imbued as we are in this 
Protestant land with the most favourable im- 
pressions of the consequences of this convul- 
sion, it is perhaps not altogether uninstructive 
to observe in what light it was regarded by the 
greatest intellects of the Catholic world, — that 
between the two we may form some estimate 
of the light in which it will be viewed by an 
impartial posterity. 

" Christians !" says he, in the exordium of 
his discourse ; " it is not surprising that the 
mnnory of a great Queen, the daughter, the 
wife, the mother of monarchs, should attract 
you from all quarters to this melancholy cere- 
mony; it will bring forcibly before your eyes 
one of those awful examples which demon- 
strate to the world the vanity of which it is 
composed. You Will see in her single life the 
extremes of human things; felicity without 
bounds, miseries without parallel; a long and 
peaceable enjoyment of one of the most noble 
crowns in the universe, all that birth and gran- 
deur could confer that was glorious, all that 
adversity and suffering could accumulate that 
was disastrous ; the good cause, attended at 
first with some success, then involved in the 
most dreadful disasters. Revolutions unheard 
of, rebellion long restrained — at length reign- 
ing triumphant; no curb there to license, no 
laws in force. Majesty itself violated by bloody 
hands, usurpation, and tyranny, under the name 



48 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



of liberty — a fugitive Queen, who can find no 
retreat in her three kingdoms, and was forced 
to seek in her native country a melancholy 
exile. Nine sea voyages undertaken against 
her will by a Queen, in spi4e of wintry tem- 
pests — a throne unworthily overturned, and 
miraculously re-established. Behold the les- 
son which God has given to kings ! thus does 
He manifest to the world the nothingness of 
its pomps and its grandeur! If our words 
fail, if language sinks beneath the grandeur 
of such a subject, the simple narrative is more 
touching than aught that words can convey. 
The heart of a great Queen, formerly elevated 
by so long a course of prosperity, then steeped 
in all the bitterness of affliction, will speak in 
sufficiently touching language ; and if it is not 
given to a private individual to teach the 
proper lessons from so mournful a catastrophe, 
the King of Israel has supplied the words — 
' Hear ! Oh ye Great of the Earth !— Take les- 
sons, ye Rulers of the World !' 

"But the wise and devout Princess, whose 
obsequies we celebrate, has not merely been a 
spectacle exhibited to the world in order that 
men might learn the counsels of Divine Pro- 
vidence, and the fatal revolutions of monar- 
chies. She took counsel herself from the ca- 
lamities in which she was involved, while 
God was instructing kings by her example. 
It is by giving and withdrawing power that 
God communicates his lessons to kings. The 
Queen we mourn has equally listened to the 
voice of these two opposite monitors. She 
has made use, like a Christian, alike of pros- 
perous and adverse fortune. In the first she 
was beneficent, in the last invincible ; as long 
as she was fortunate, she let her power be felt 
only by her unbounded deeds of goodness ; 
when wrapt in misery, she enriched herself 
more than ever by the heroic virtues befitting 
misfortune. For her own good, she has lost 
that sovereign power which she formerly ex- 
ercised only for the blessings of her subjects ; 
and if her friends — if the universal church 
have profited by her prosperities, she herself 
has profited more from her calamities than 
from all her previous grandeur. That is the 
great lesson to be drawn from the ever-memo- 
rable life of Henrietta Maria of France, Queen 
of Great Britain. 

" I need not dwell on the illustrious birth of 
that Princess ; no rank on earth equals it in 
lustre. Her virtues have been not less re- 
markable than her descent. She was endowed 
with a generosity truly royal; of a truth, it 
might be said, that she deemed every thing 
lost which was not given away. Nor were 
her other virtues less admirable. The faithful 
depositary of many important complaints and 
secrets — it was her favourite maxim that 
princes should observe the same silence as 
confessors, and exercise the same discretion. 
In the utmost fury of the Civil Wars never 
was her word doubted, or her clemency called 
in question. Who has so nobly exercised that 
winning art which humbles without lowering 
itself, and confers so graciously liberty, while 
it commands respect] At once mild yet firm — 
condescending, yet dignified — she knew at the 
«ame time how to convince and persuade, and 



to support by reason, rather than enforce by 
authority. With what prudence did she con- 
duct herself in circumstances the most ar- 
duous ; if a skilful hand could have saved the 
state, hers was the one to have done it. Her 
magnanimity can never be sufficiently extolled. 
Fortune had no power over her; neither the 
evils which she foresaw, nor those by which 
she was surprised, could lower her courage. 
What shall I say to her immovable fidelity to 
the religion of her ancestors 1 She knew well 
that that attachment constituted the glory of 
her house, as well as of the whole of France, 
sole nation in the world which, during the 
twelve centuries of its existence, has never 
seen on the throne but the faithful children of 
the church. Uniformly she declared that no- 
thing should detach her from the faith of St. 
Louis. The King, her husband, has pro- 
nounced upon her the noblest of all eulogiums, 
that their hearts were in union in all but the 
matter of religion ; and confirming by his tes- 
timony the piety of the Queen, that enlightened 
Prince has made known to all the world at 
once his tenderness, his conjugal attachment, 
and the sacred, inviolable fidelity of his in- 
comparable spouse." 

All the world must admire the sustained 
dignity of this noble eulogium; but touching 
as were the misfortunes, heroic the character, 
of the unfortunate Henrietta, it more nearly 
concerns us to attend to the opinion of Bossuet 
on the great theological convulsion, in the 
throes of which she was swallowed up. 

" When God permits the smoke to arise from 
the pits of the abyss which darkens the face 
of Heaven — that is, when he sutlers heresy to 
arise — when, to punish the scandals of the 
church, or awaken the piety of the people and 
their pastors, He permits the darkness of error 
to deceive the most elevated minds, and to 
spread abroad throughout the world a haughty 
chagrin, a disquieted curiosity, a spirit of re- 
volt, He determines, in his infinite wisdom, 
the limits which are to be imposed to the pro- 
gress of error, the stay which is to be put to 
the sufferings of the church. I do not pretend 
to announce to you, Christians, the destiny of 
the heresies of our times, nor to be able to 
assign the fatal boundary by which God has 
restrained their course. But if my judgment 
does not deceive me; if, recurring to the his- 
tory of past ages, I rightly apply their experi- 
ence to the present, I am led to the opinion, 
and the wisest of men concur in the sentiment, 
that the days of blindness are past, and that the 
time is approaching when the true light will return. 

" When Henry VIII., a prince in other re- 
spects so accomplished, was seduced by the 
passions which blinded Solomon and so many- 
other kings, and began to shake the authority 
of the Church, the wise warned him, that if he 
stirred that one point, he would throw the 
whole fabric of government into peril, and in- 
fuse, in opposition to his wishes, a frightful 
license into future ages. The wise forewarned 
him ; but when is passion controlled by wis- 
dom ; when does not folly smile at its predic- 
tions 1 That, however, which a prudent fore- 
sight could not persuade to men, a ruder in- 
structor, experience, has compelled them to 



BOSSUET. 



49 



believe. All that religion has that is most sa- 
cred has been sacrificed ; England has changed 
so far that it no longer can recognise itself; 
and, more agitated in its bosom and on its own 
soil than even the ocean which surrounds it, 
it has been overwhelmed by a frightful inun- 
dation of innumerable absurd sects. Who can 
predict but what, repenting of its enormous 
errors concerning Government, it may not ex- 
tend its reflections still farther, and look back 
with fond regret to the tranquil condition of re- 
ligious thought which preceded the convul- 
sions V 

Amidst all this pomp of language, and this 
sagacious intermixture of political foresight 
with religious prepossession, there is one re- 
flection which necessarily forces itself upon 
the mind. Bossuet conceived, and conceived 
justly, that the frightful atrocities into which 
religious dissension had precipitated the Eng- 
lish people would produce a general reaction 
against the theological fervour from which 
they had originated; and that the days of ex- 
travagant fervour were numbered, from the 
very extent of the general suffering which its 
aberrations had occasioned. In arriving at 
this conclusion, he correctly reasoned from 
the past to the present; and foretold a decline 
in false opinion, from the woful consequences 
which Providence had attached to its continu- 
ance. Yet how widely did he err when he 
imagined that the days of the Reformation 
were numbered, or that England, relapsing 
into the quiet despotism of former days, was 
to fall back again into the arms of the Eternal 
Church ! At that very moment the broad and 
deep foundations of British freedom were in 
the act of being laid, and that power was aris- 
ing, destined in future ages to be the bulwark 
of the Protestant faith, the vehicle of pure un- 
defined religion to the remotest corners of the 
earth. The great theological convulsions of 
the sixteenth century were working out their 
appropriate fruits; a new world was peopling 
by its energy, and rising into existence from 
its spirit ; and from the oppressed and dis- 
tracted shores of England those hosts of emi- 
grants were embarking for distant regions, 
who were destined, at no remote period, to 
spread the Church of England and the Pro- 
testant faith through the countless millions of 
the American race. The errors, indeed the 
passions, the absurdities of that unhappy pe- 
riod, as Bossuet rightly conjectured, have 
passed away ; the Fifth Monarchy men no 
longer disturb the plains of England; the 
chants of the Covenanters are no longer heard 
on the mountains of Scotland ; transferred to 
the faithful record of history or the classic 
pages of romance, these relics of the olden 
time only furnish a heart-stirring subject for 
the talents of the historian or the genius of the 
novelist. But the human mind never falls 
back, though it often halts in its course. Ves- 
tigia nulla retrorsum is the law of social affairs 
hot less than of the fabled descent to the 
shades below; the descendants of the Puritans 
and the Covenanters have abjured the absur- 
dities of their fathers, but they have not re- 
lapsed into the chains of Popery. Purified of 
its corruptions by the indignant voice of in- 
7 



surgent reason, freed from its absurdities by 
the experience of the calamities with which 
they were attended, the fair form of Catholic 
Christianity has arisen in the British Isles; 
imbued with the spirit of the universal Church, 
but destitute of the rancour of its deluded sec- 
taries ; borrowing from the religion of Rome 
its charity, adopting from the Lutheran Church 
its morality; sharing with reason its intellec- 
tual triumphs, inheriting from faith its spiri- 
tual constancy, not disdaining the support of 
ages, and yet not excluding the light of time ; 
glorying in the antiquity of its descent, and, 
at the same time, admitting the necessity of 
recent reformation ; it has approached as near 
as the weakness of humanity, and the limited 
extent of our present vision will permit, to 
that model of ideal perfection which, veiled in 
the silver robes of innocence, the faithful trust 
is one day to pervade the earth. And if pre- 
sent appearances justify any presentiments as 
to future events, the destinies of this church 
are worthy of the mighty collision of antiqui- 
ty with revolution, of the independence of 
thought with the reverence for authority, from 
which it arose, and the vast part assigned to 
it in human affairs. The glories of the Eng- 
lish nation, the triumphs of the English navy, 
have been the pioneers of its progress ; the in- 
fidel triumphs of the French Revolution, the 
victorious career of Napoleon, have minister- 
ed to its success ; it is indissolubly wound up 
with the progress of the Anglo-American race; 
it is spreading over the wilds of Australia; 
slowly but steadily it is invading the primeval 
deserts of Africa. It shares the destiny of the 
language of Milton, Shakspeare, and Scott; it 
must grow with the growth of a colonial em- 
pire which encircles the earth ; the invention 
of printing, the discovery of steam navigation, 
are the vehicles of its mercies to mankind ! 

" I have spoken," says Bossuet, " of the 
license into which the human mind is thrown, 
when once the foundations of religion are 
shaken, and the ancient landmarks are re- 
moved. 

" But as the subject of the present discourse 
affords so unique and memorable an example 
for the instruction of all ages of the lengths to 
which such furious passions will lead the peo- 
ple, I must, in justice to my subject, recur to 
the original sources of error, and conduct you, 
step by step, from the first contempt and dis- 
regard of the church to the final atrocities in 
which it has plunged mankind. 

" The fountain of the whole evil is to be 
found in those in the last century, who at- 
tempted reformation by means of schism ; 
finding the church an invincible barrier against 
all their innovations, they felt themselves under 
the necessity of overturning it. Thus the 
decrees of the Councils, the doctrines of the 
fathers, the traditions of the Holy See, and of 
the Catholic Church, have been no longer con- 
sidered as sacred and inviolable. Every one 
has made for himself a tribunal, where he 
rendered himself the arbiter of his own belief; 
and yet the innovators did impose some limits 
to the changes of thought by restraining them 
within the bounds of holy writ, as if the mo- 
ment that the principle is once admitted that 
E 



50 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



every "believer may put what interpretations 
upon its passages he pleases, and buoy him- 
self up with the belief that the Holy Spirit has 
dictated to him his own peculiar explanation, 
there is no individual who may not at once 
conceive himself authorized to worship his 
own inventions, to consecrate his thoughts, 
and call the wanderings of his imagination 
divine inspiration. From the moment this 
fatal doctrine was introduced, it was distinctly 
foreseen by the wise that license of thought 
being now emancipated from all control, sects 
would multiply ad infinitum; obstinacy become 
invincible; disputes interminable; and that, 
while some would give to their reveries the 
name of inspiration, others, disgusted with 
such extravagant visions, and not being able 
to reconcile the majesty of religion with a 
faith torn by so many divisions, would seek a 
fatal repose in the indifference of irreligion, or 
the hardihood of atheism. 

" Such, and more fatal still, have been the 
natural effects of the new doctrine. But, in 
like manner, as a stream which has burst its 
banks does not everywhere produce the same 
ravages, because its rapidity does not find 
everywhere the same inclinations and open- 
ings, thus, although that spirit of indocility 
and independence was generally diffused 
through all the heresies of latter times, it has 
not produced universally the same effects; it 
has in many quarters been restrained by fear, 
worldly interests, and the particular humour 
of nations, or by the Supreme Power, which 
can impose, where it seems good, effectual 
limits even to the utmost extravagance of hu- 
man passion. If it has appeared in undis- 
guised malignity in England — if its malignity 
has declared itself without reserve — if its kings 
have perished under its fury, it is because its 
kings have been the primary causes of the 
catastrophe. They have yielded too much to 
the popular delusion that the ancient religion 
was susceptible of improvement. Their sub- 
jects have in consequence ceased to revere its 
maxims ; they could have no respect for it 
when they saw them daily giving place to the 
passions and caprices of princes. The earth, 
too frequently moved, has become incapable 
of consistence; the mountains, once so stable, 
have fallen on all sides, and ghastly preci- 
pices have started forth from their bared 
sides. I apply these remarks to all the fright- 
ful aberrations which we daily see rising up 
around us. Be not deluded with the idea that 
they are only a quarrel of the Episcopacy, or 
some disputes of the English Church, which 
have so profoundly moved the Commons. 
These disputes were nothing but the feeble 
commencement, slight essays by which the 
turbulent spirits made trial of their liberty. 
Something much more violent was stirring 
their hearts ; a secret disgust at all authority 
— an insatiable craving after innovation, after 
they had once tasted its delicious sweets. 

" Thus the Calvinists, more bold than the 
Lutherans, have paved the way for the Soci- 
nians, whose numbers increase every day. 
From the same source have sprung the infinite 
fcects of the Anabaptists, and from their opi- 
nions, mingled with the tenets of Calvinism, 



have sprung the Independents, to whose ex- 
travagances it was thought no parallel could 
be found till there emerged out of their bosom 
a still more fanatic race, the Tremblers, who 
believe that all their reveries are Divine in- 
spiration ; and the Seekers, who, seventeen 
hundred years after Christ, still look for the 
Saviour, whom they have never yet been able 
to find. It is thus, that when the earth was 
once stirred, ruins fell on ruins ; when opinion 
was once shaken, sect multiplied upon sect. 
In vain the kings of England flattered them- 
selves that they would be able to arrest the 
human mind on this perilous declivity by pre- 
serving the Episcopacy; for what could the 
bishops do, when they had themselves under- 
mined their own authority, and all the reve- 
rence due to the power which they derived by 
succession from the apostolic ages, by openly 
condemning their predecessors, even as far 
back as the origin of their spiritual authority, 
in the person of St. Gregory and his disciple 
St. Augustin, the first apostle of the English 
nation 1 What is Episcopacy, when it is 
severed from the Church, which is its main 
stay, to attach itself, contrary to its divine na- 
ture, to royalty as its supreme head"? Thus 
two powers, of a character so essentially dif- 
ferent, can never properly unite; their func- 
tions are so different that they mutually impede 
each ; and the majesty of the kings of Eng- 
land would have remained inviolable, if, con- 
tent with its sacred rights, it had not endea- 
voured to draw to itself the privileges and 
prerogatives of the Church. Thus nothing 
has arrested the violence of the spirit, so fruit- 
ful is error; and God, to punish the irreligious 
irritability of his people, has delivered them 
over to the intemperance of their own vain 
curiosity, so that the ardour of their insensate 
disputes has become the most dangerous of 
their maladies. 

" Can we be surprised if they lost all respect 
for majesty and the laws, if they became fac- 
tious, rebellious, and obstinate, Avhen such 
principles were instilled into their minds 7 Re- 
ligion is fatally enervated when it is changed; 
the weight is taken away which can alone 
restrain mankind. There is in the bottom of 
every heart a rebellious spirit, which never 
fails to escape if the necessary restraint is 
taken away ; no curb is left when men are 
once taught that they may dispose at pleasure 
of religion. Thence has sprung that pretended 
reign of Christ, heretofore unknown to Christ- 
endom, which was destined to annihilate roy- 
alty, and render all men equal, under the 
name of Independents; a seditious dream, an 
impious and sacrilegious chimera; but valu- 
able as a proof of the eternal truth, that every 
thing turns to sedition and treason, when once 
the authority of religion is destroyed. But 
why seek for proofs of a truth, while the Divine 
Spirit has pronounced upon the subject an 
unalterable sentence? God has himself de- 
clared that he will withdraw from the people 
who alter the religion which he has establish- 
ed, and deliver them over to the scourge of 
civil war. Hear the prophet Zacharias ! 
' Their souls, saith the Lord, have swerved 
from me, and I have said I will no longer be 



BOSSUET. 



61 



your shepherd ; let him who is to die prepare 
for death ; let he who is to be cut off perish, 
and the remainder shall prey on each other's 
flesh.' "* — Bossuet's Orais. Funeb. de la Heine 
iTJlnglcterre. 

The character and the career of the triumph 
of Cromwell are thus sketched out by the 
same master-hand: — 

"Contempt of the unity of the Church was 
doubtless the cause of the divisions of Eng- 
land. If it is asked how it happened that so 
many opposite and irreconcilable sects should 
have united themselves to overthrow the royal 
authority? the answer is plain — a man arose 
of an incredible depth of thought; as profound 
a hypocrite as he was a skilful politician ; 
capable alike of undertaking and concealing 
everything; active and indefatigable equally 
in peace as war; so vigilant and active, that 
he has never proved awanting to any oppor- 
tunity which presented itself to his elevation ; 
in fine, one of those stirring and audacious 
spirits which seem born to overturn the world. 
How hazardous the fate of such persons is, 
sufficiently appears from the history of all 
ages. But also what can they not accomplish 
when it pleases God to make use of them for 
his purposes 1 ' It was given to him to deceive 
the people, and to prevail against kings.'f 
Perceiving that in that infinite assembly of 
sects, who were destitute of all certain rules, 
the pleasure of indulging in their own dogmas 
was the secret charm which fascinated all 
minds, he contrived to play upon that mon- 
strous propensity so as to render that monstrous 
assembly a most formidable body. When once 
the secret is discovered of leading the multitude 
by the attractions of liberty, it follows blindly, be- 
cause it hears only that name. The people, oc- 
cupied with the first object which had trans- 
ported them, go blindfold on, without perceiving 
that they are on the high road to servitude ; 
and their subtle conductor, at once a soldier, a 
preacher, a combatant, and a dogmatizer, so 
enchanted the world, that he came to be re- 
garded as a chief sent by God to work out the 
triumph of the cause of independence. He 
was so ; but it was for its punishment. The 
design of the Almighty was to instruct kings, 
by this great example, in the danger of leaving 
his church: He wished to unfold to men to 
what lengths, both in temporal and spiritual 
matters, the rebellious spirit of schism can 
lead ; and when, in order to accomplish this 
end, he has made choice of an instrument, 
nothing can arrest his course. 'I am the 
Lord,' said he, by the mouth of his prophet 
Jeremiah ; ' I made the earth, and all that 
therein is : I place it in the hands of whom I 
will."'— Ibid. 

It is curious to those who reflect on the pro- 



• Zech. xi. 9. 



t Rev. xiii. 5. 



gress of the human mind from one age to 
another, to observe the large intermixture of 
error with truth that pervades this remarkable 
passage. It is clear that the powerful and 
sagacious mind of the Bishop of Meaux had 
penetrated the real nature of the revolutionary 
spirit, whether in religion or politics ; and, ac- 
cordingly, there is a great deal of truth in his 
observations on the English Revolution. But 
he narrows too much the view which he took 
of it. He ascribes more than its due to the 
secession from the Church of Rome. No one 
can doubt, indeed, that religious fervour was 
the great lever which then moved mankind; 
and that Bossuet was correct in holding that 
it was the fervour of the Reformation running 
into fanaticism, which, spreading from spiritual 
to temporal concerns, produced the horrors of 
the Great Rebellion. But, on the other hand, 
the event has proved that it was no part of the 
design of Providence to compel the English, 
by the experience of suffering, to fall again 
into the arms of the Church of Rome. An 
hundred and seventy years have elapsed since 
Bossuet composed these splendid passages, 
and the Church of England is not only still 
undecayed, but it is flourishing now in reno- 
vated youth, and has spread its colonial de- 
scendants through every part of the earth. 
The Church of Rome still holds its ground in 
more than half of old Europe ; but Protestant- 
ism has spread with the efforts of colonial en- 
terprise, and the Bible and the hatchet have 
gone hand in hand in exploring the wilds of 
the New World. And the hand of Providence 
is equally clear in both. Catholicism is suited 
to the stately monarchies, antiquated civiliza- 
tion, and slavish habits of Southern Europe; 
but it is totally unfit to animate the exertions 
and inspire the spirit of the dauntless emi- 
grants who are to spread the seeds of civiliza- 
tion through the wilderness of nature. And 
one thing is very remarkable, and affords a 
striking ill ustration of that subjection of human 
affairs to an overruling Providence which Bos- 
suet has so eloquently asserted in all parts of 
his writings. Mr. Hume has observed that the 
marriage of Queen Henrietta to Charles I., by 
the partiality for the Catholic faith which it 
infused into his descendants, is the principal 
reason of their being at this moment exiles 
from the British throne! It was deemed at 
the time a masterpiece of the Court of Rome 
to place a Catholic Queen on the throne of 
England ; and the conversion of that bright 
jewel to the tiara of St. Peter was confidently 
anticipated from its effects; and its ultimate 
results have been not only to confirm the Pro- 
testant faith in the British isles, but diffuse its 
seed, by the distraction and suffering of the 
Civil Wars, through the boundless colonial 
empire of Great Britain. 



52 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



POLAND.* 



The recent events in Poland have awakened 
the old and but half-extinguished interest of the 
British people in the fate of that unhappy 
country. The French may regard the Polish 
legions as the vanguard only of revolutionary 
movement: the Radicals may hail their strug- 
gle as the first fruits of political regeneration: 
the great majority of observers in this country 
think of them only as a gallant people, bravely 
combating for their independence, and forget 
the shades of political difference in the great 
cause of national freedom. The sympathy 
with the Poles, accordingly, is universal. It 
is as strong with the Tories as the Whigs, with 
the supporters of antiquated abuse as the aspi- 
rants after modern improvement. Political 
considerations combine with generous feeling 
in this general interest. And numbers who 
regard with aversion any approach towards 
revolutionary warfare, yet view it with com- 
placency when it seems destined to interpose 
Sarmatian valour between European indepen- 
dence and Muscovite ambition. 

The history of Poland, however, contains 
more subjects of interest than this. It is fraught 
with political instruction as well as romantic 
adventure, and exhibits on a great scale the 
consequences of that democratic equality 
which, with uninformed politicians, is so much 
the object of eulogium. The French revolu- 
tionists, who sympathize so vehemently with 
the Poles in their contest with Russian despot- 
ism, little imagine that the misfortunes of that 
country are the result of that very equality 
which they have made such sacrifices to at- 
tain; and that in the weakness of Poland may 
he discerned the consequences of the political 
system which they consider as the perfection 
of society. 

Poland, in ancient, possessed very much the 
extent and dominion of Russia in Europe in 
modern times. It stretched from the Baltic to 
the Euxine ; from Smolensko to Bohemia ; and 
embraced within its bosom the whole Scythia 
of antiquity — the storehouse of nations, from 
whence the hordes issued who so long pressed 
upon and at last overthrew the Roman empire. 
Its inhabitants have in every age been cele- 
brated for their heroic valour : they twice, in 
conjunction with the Tartars, captured the 
ancient capital of Russia, and the conflagration 
of Moscow, and retreat of Napoleon, were but 
the repetition of what had resulted five centu- 
ries before from the appearance of the Polish 
eagles on the banks of the Moskwa. Placed 
on the frontiers of European civilization, they 
long formed its barrier against barbarian inva- 
sion : and the most desperate wars they ever 
maintained were those which they had to 
carry on with their own subjects, the Cossacks 
of the Ukraine, whose roving habits and pre- 



* Salvandy's Histoire de la Polopne, 3 vols. Paris. 1830. 
Reviewed in Blackwood's Magazine, Aug. 1831. Writ- 
ten during the Polish war. 



datory life disdained the restraints of regular 
government. When we read the accounts of 
the terrible struggles they maintained with the 
great insurrection of these formidable hordes 
under Bogdan, in the 17th century, we are 
transported to the days of Scythian warfare, 
and recognise the features of that dreadful 
invasion of the Sarmatian tribes, which the 
genius of Marius averted from the Roman 
republic. 

Nor has the military spirit of the people de- 
clined in modern times. The victories of 
Sobieski, the deliverance of Vienna, seem 
rather the fiction of romance than the records 
of real achievement. No victory so glorious 
as that of Kotzim had been gained by Chris- 
tendom over the Saracens since the triumphs 
of Richard on the field of Ascalon : And the 
tide of Mahommedan conquest would have 
rolled resistlessly over the plains of Germany, 
even in the reign of Louis XIV., if it had not 
been arrested by the Polish hero under the 
walls of Vienna. Napoleon said it was the 
peculiar quality of the Polanders to form sol- 
diers more rapidly than any other people. 
And their exploits in the Italian and Spanish 
campaigns justified the high eulogium and 
avowed partiality of that great commander. 
No swords cut deeper than theirs in the Rus- 
sian ranks during the campaign of 1812, and 
alone, amidst universal defection, they main- 
tained their faith inviolate in the rout at Leip- 
sic. But for the hesitation of the French em- 
peror in restoring their independence, the 
whole strength of the kingdom would have 
been roused on the invasion of Russia; and 
had this been done, had the Polish monarchy 
formed the support of French ambition, the 
history of the world might have been changed; 

"From Fate's dark book one leaf been torn, 
And Fiodden had been Bannockburn." 

How, then, has it happened that a country 
of such immense extent, inhabited by so martial 
a people, whose strength on great occasions 
was equal to such achievements, should in 
every age have been so unfortunate, that their 
victories should have led to no result, and 
their valour so often proved inadequate to 
save their country from dismemberment 1 The 
plaintive motto, Quomodo Lapsus; Quid feci, 
may With still more justice be applied to the 
fortunes of Poland than the fall of the Court- 
enays. " Always combating," says Salvandy, 
"frequently victorious, they never gained an 
accession of territory, and were generally 
glad to terminate a glorious contest by a 
cession of the ancient provinces of the re- 
public." 

Superficial observers will answer, that it 
was the elective form of government; their 
unfortunate situation in the midst of military 
powers, and the absence of any chain of moun- 
tains to form the refuge of unfortunate patriot- 



POLAND. 



53 



ism. But a closer examination will demon- 
strate that these causes were not sufficient to 
explain the phenomenon ; and that the series 
of disasters which have so long overwhelmed 
the monarchy, have arisen from a more per- 
manent and lasting cause than either their 
physical situation or elective government. 

The Polish crown has not always been 
elective. For two hundred and twenty years 
they were governed by the race of the Jagellons 
with as much regularity as the Plantagenets 
of England; and yet, during that dynasty, the 
losses of the republic were fully as great as in 
the subsequent periods. Prussia is as flat, 
and incomparably more sterile than Poland, 
and, with not a third of the territory, it is 
equally exposed to the ambition of its neigh- 
bours : Yet Prussia, so far from being the 
subject of partition, has steadily increased in 
territory and population, and now numbers 
fifteen millions of souls in her dominion. The 
fields of Poland, as rich and fertile as those of 
Flanders, seem the prey of every invader, 
while the patriotism of the Flemings has 
studded their plains with defensive fortresses 
which have secured their independence, not- 
withstanding the vicinity of the most ambitious 
and powerful monarchy in Europe. 

The real cause of the never-ending disasters 
of Poland, is to be found in the democratic 
equality, which, from the remotest ages, has 
prevailed in the country. The elective form 
of government was the consequence of this 
principle in their constitution, which has de- 
scended to them from Scythian freedom, and 
has entailed upon the state disasters worse 
than the whirlwind of Scythian invasion. 

" It is a mistake," says Salvandy, " to sup- 
pose that the representative form of govern- 
ment was found in the woods of Germany. 
What was found in the woods was Polish 
equality, which has descended unimpaired in 
all the parts of that vast monarchy to the present 
times.* It was not to our Scythian ancestors, 
but the early councils of the Christian church, 
that we are indebted for the first example of 
representative assemblies." In these words 
of great and philosophic importance is to be 
found the real origin of the disasters of Poland. 

The principle of government, from the earli- 
est times in Poland, was, that every free man 
had an equal right to the administration of 
public affairs, and that he was entitled to ex- 
ercise this right, not' by representation, but in 
person. The result of this was, that the whole 
freemen of the country constituted the real 
government; and the diets were attended by 
an hundred thousand horsemen ; the great ma- 
jority of whom were, of course, ignorant, and 
in necessitous circumstances, while all were 
penetrated with an equal sense of their im- 
portance as members of the Polish state. The 
convocation of these tumultuous assemblies 
was almost invariably the signal for murder 
and disorder. Thirty or forty thousand lackeys, 
in the service of the nobles, but still possess- 
ing the rights of freemen, followed their mas- 
ters to the place of meeting, and were ever 
ready to support their ambition by military 



* Salvandy, vol. i. Tableau Historique. 



violence, while the unfortunate natives, eat 
up by such an enormous assemblage of armed, 
men, regarded the convocation of the citizens 
in the same light as the inhabitants of the 
Grecian city did the invasion of Xerxes, whose 
hordes had consumed every thing eatable in 
their territory at breakfast, when they re- 
turned thanks to the gods that he had not 
dined in their neighbourhood, or every living 
creature would have perished. 

So far did the Poles cany this equality 
among all the free citizens, that by an original 
and fundamental law, called the Libermn Veto, 
anyone member of the diet, by simply inter- 
posing his negative, could stop the election of 
the sovereign, or any other measure the most 
essential to the public welfare. Of course, in 
so immense a multitude, some were always to 
be found fractious or venal enough to exercise 
this dangerous power, either from individual 
perversity, the influence of external corrup- 
tion, or internal ambition; and hence the 
numerous occasions on which diets, assembled 
for the most important purposes, were broken 
up without having come to any determination, 
and the Republic left a prey to anarchy, at the 
time when it stood most in need of the unani- 
mous support of its members. It is a striking 
proof how easily men are deluded by this 
phantom of general equality, when it is re- 
collected that this ruinous privilege has, not 
only in every age, been clung to as the Magna 
Charta of Poland, but that the native historians, 
recounting distant events, speak of any in- 
fringement upon it as the most fatal measure 
that could possibly be figured, to the liberties 
and welfare of the country. 

All human institutions, however, must be 
subject to some check, which renders it 
practicable to get through business on urgent 
occasions, in spite of individual opposition. 
The Poles held it utterly at variance with 
every principle of freedom to bind any free 
man by a law to which he had not consented. 
The principle, that the majority could bind the 
minorit\% seemed to them inconsistent with 
the most elementary ideas of liberty. To get 
quit of the difficulty, they commonly massacred 
the recusant : and this appeared, in their eyes, 
a much less serious violation of freedom than 
out-voting him; because, said they, instances 
of violence are few, and do not go beyond the 
individual sufferers ; but when once the rulers 
establish that the majority can compel the 
minority to yield, no man has any security 
against the violation of his freedom. 

Extremes meet. It is curious to observe 
how exactly the violation of freedom by po- 
pular folly coincides in its effect with its ex- 
tinction by despotic power. The bow-string 
in the Seraglio, and assassination at St. Peters- 
burg, are the limitations on arbitrary power in 
these despotic states. Popular murders were 
the means of restraining the exorbitant liberty 
of the Poles within the limits necessary for the 
maintenance of the forms even of regular 
government. Strange, as Salvandy has well 
observed, that the nation the most jealous of 
its liberty, should, at the same time adhere to 
a custom of all others the most desti active to 
freedom ; and that, to avoid the government 
e2 



54 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



of one, they should submit to the despotism 
of all ! 

It was this original and fatal passion for 
equality, which has in every age proved fatal 
to Polish independence — which has paralyzed 
all the valour of her people, and all the en- 
thusiasm of her character — and rendered the 
most warlike nation in Europe the most un- 
fortunate. The measures of its government 
partook of the unstable and vacillating cha- 
racter of all popular assemblages. Bursts of 
patriotism were succeeded by periods of dejec- 
tion ; and the endless changes in the objects 
of popular inclination, rendered it impracti- 
cable to pursue any steady object, or adhere, 
through all the varieties of fortune, to one uni- 
form system for the good of the state. Their 
wars exactly resembled the contests in La 
Vendee, where, a week after the most glorious 
successes, the victorious army was dissolved, 
and the leaders wandering with a few fol- 
lowers in the woods. At the battle of Kotzim, 
Sobieski commanded 40,000 men, the most 
regular army which for centuries Poland had 
sent into the field; at their head, he stormed 
the Turkish entrenchments, though defended 
by 80,000 veterans, and 300 pieces of cannon ; 
he routed that mighty host, slew 50,000 men, 
and carried the Polish ensigns in triumph to 
the banks of the Danube. But while Europe 
resounded with his praises, and expected the 
deliverance of the Greek empire from his 
exertions, his army dissolved — the troops re- 
turned to their homes — and the invincible 
conqueror was barely able, with a few thou- 
sand men, to keep the field. 

Placed on the frontiers of Europe and Asia, 
the Polish character and history have partaken 
largely of the effects of the institutions of both 
these quarters of the globe. Their passion 
for equality, their spirit of freedom, their na- 
tional assemblages, unite them to European 
independence ; their unstable fortune, per- 
petual vacillation, and chequered annals, par- 
take of the character of Asiatic adventure. 
While the states by whom they are surrounded, 
have shared in the steady progress of Euro- 
pean civilization, the Polish monarchy has 
been distinguished by the extraordinary vicis- 
situdes of Eastern story. Elevated to the 
clouds during periods of heroic adventure, it 
has sunk to nothing upon the death of a single 
chief; the republic which had recently carried 
its arms in triumph to the neighbouring capi- 
tals, was soon struggling for its existence with 
a contemptible enemy; and the bulwark of 
Christendom in one age, was in the next razed 
from the book of nations. 

Would we discover the cause of this vacil- 
lation, of which the deplorable consequences 
are now so strongly exemplified, we shall find 
it in the passion for equality which appears in 
every stage of their history, and of which M. 
Salvandy, a liberal historian, has given a pow- 
erful picture : — 

"The proscription of their greatest princes," 
says he, "and, after their death, the calumnies 
of posterity, faithfully echoing the follies of 
contemporaries, have destroyed all those who 
in different ages have endeavoured, in Poland, 
to create a solid or protecting power. Nothing 



is more extraordinary than to hear the modern 
annalists of that unfortunate people, whatever 
their country or doctrine may be, mechanically 
repeat all the national outcry against what they 
call their despotic tyrants. Facts speak in 
vain against such prejudices. In the eyes of 
the Poles, nothing was worthy of preservation 
in their country but liberty and eqvality ,- — a high- 
sounding expression, which the French Revo- 
lution had not the glory of inventing, nor its 
authors the wisdom to apply more judiciously. 

" Contrary to what has occurred everywhere 
else in the world, the Poles have never been 
at rest but under the rule of feeble monarchs. 
Great and vigorous kings were uniformly the 
first to perish ; they have always sunk under 
vain attempts to accustom an independent no- 
bility to the restraints of authority, or soften to 
their slaves the yoke of bondage. Thus the 
royal authority, which elsewhere expanded on 
the ruins of the feudal system, has in Poland 
only become weaker with the progress of time. 
All the efforts of its monarchs to enlarge their 
prerogative have been shattered against a 
compact, independent, courageous body of 
freemen, who, in resisting such attempts, have 
never either been weakened by division nor 
intimidated by menace. In their passion for 
equality, in their jealous independence, they 
were unwilling even to admit any distinction 
between each other; they long and haughtily 
rejected the titles of honour of foreign states, 
and even till the last age, refused to recognise 
those hereditary distinctions and oppressive 
privileges, which are now so fast disappear- 
ing from the face of society. They even went 
so far as to insist that one, in matters of de- 
liberation, should be equal to all. The crown 
was thus constantly at war with a democracy 
of nobles. The dynasty' of the Piasts strove 
with much ability to create, in the midst of 
that democracy, a few leading families; by 
the side of those nobles, a body of burghers. 
These things, difficult in all states, were there 
impossible. An hereditary dynasty, always 
stormy and often interrupted, was unfit for the 
persevering efforts requisite for such a revolu- 
tion. In other states the monarchs pursued 
an uniform policy, and their subjects were va- 
cillating; there the people were steady, and 
the crown changeable." — I. 71. 

" In other states, time had everywhere in- 
troduced the hereditary descent of honours and 
power. Hereditary succession was established 
from the throne to the smallest fief, from the 
reciprocal necessity of subduing the van- 
quished people, and securing to each his share 
in the conquests. In Poland, on the other 
hand, the waywoods, or warlike chieftains, the 
magistrates and civil authorities, the governors 
of castles and provinces, so far from founding 
an aristocracy by establishing the descent of 
their honours or offices in their families, were 
seldom even nominated by the king. Their 
authority, especially that of the Palatins, ex- 
cited equal umbrage in the sovereign who 
should have ruled, as the nobles who should 
have obeyed them. There was thus authority 
and order nowhere in the state. 

" It is not surprising that such men should 
unite to the pride which could bear nothing 



POLAND. 



above, the tyranny which could spare nothing ! plete manner. Its introduction corrected none 
below them. In the dread of being compelled of the ancient abuses. The king was still 
to share their power with their inferiors ele- j the president of tumultuous assemblies ; sur- 



vated by riches or intelligence, they affixed a 
stigma on every useful profession as a mark 
of servitude. Their maxim was, that nobility 
of blood was not lost by indigence or domestic 
service, but totally extinguished by commerce 
or industry. This policy perpetually withheld 
from the great body of serfs the use of arms, 
both because they had learned to fear, but still 
continued to despise them. In fine, jealous of 
every species of superiority as a personal out- 
rage, of every authority as an usurpation, of 
every labour as a degradation, this society 
was at variance with every principle of human 
prosperity. 

" Weakened in this manner in their external 
contests, by their equality not less than their 
tyranny, inferior to their neighbours in number 
and discipline, the Poles were the only warlike 
people in the world to whom victory never 
gave either peace or conquest. Incessant con- 
tests with the Germans, the Hungarians, the 
pirates of the north, the Cossacks of the 
Ukraine, the Osmanlis, occupy their whole 
annals ; but never did the Polish eagles ad- 
vance the frontiers of the republic. Poland 
saw Moravia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, es- 
cape from its rule, as Bohemia and Mecklen- 
burg had formerly done, without ever being 
awakened to the necessity of establishinga cen- 
tral government sufficiently strong to coerce 
and protect so many discordant materials. 
She was destined to drink to the last dregs the 
bitter consequences of a pitiless aristocracy 
and a senseless equality. 

"Vainly did Time, whose ceaseless course, 
by breaking through that fierce and oppressive 
equality, had succeeded where its monarchs 
had failed, strive to introduce a better order 
of things. Poland was destined, in all the 
ages of its history, to differ from all the other 
European states. With the progress of wealth, 
a race of burghers at length sprung up — an 
aristocracy of wealth and possessions arose ; 
but both, contrary to the genius of the people, 
perished before they arrived at maturity. The 
first was speedily overthrown ; in the convul- 
sion consequent upon the establishment of 
the last, the national independence was de- 
stroyed." — I. 74. 

Of the practical consequences of this fatal 
passion for equality in the legislature and the 
form of government, our author gives the fol- 
lowing curious account: — 

"The extreme difficulty of providing food 
for their comitia of an hundred thousand citi- 
zens on horseback, obliged the members of 
the diet to terminate their deliberations in a 
few days, or rather to separate, after having 



rounded by obstacles on every side ; controlled, 
by generals and ministers not of his own se- 
lection ; obliged to defend the acts of a cabinet 
which he could not control, against the cries 
of a furious diet. And these diets, which 
united, sabre in hand, under the eye of the 
sovereign, and still treated of all the important 
affairs of the state — of war and peace, the 
election of a sovereign, the formation of laws 
— which gave audience to ambassadors, and 
administered justice in important cases — 
were still the Champs de Mars of the northern 
tribes, and partook to the very last of all the 
vices of the savage character. There was 
the same confusion of powers, the same ele- 
ments of disorder, the same license to them- 
selves, the same tyranny over others. 

"This attempt at a representative govern- 
ment was destructive to the last shadow of the 
royal authority; the meetings of the deputies 
became fixed and frequent; the power of the 
sovereign was lost without any permanent 
body arising to receive it in his room. The 
system of deputations made slow progress ; 
and in several provinces was never admitted. 
General diets, where the whole nation as- 
sembled, became more rare, and therefore 
more perilous; and as they were convoked 
only on great occasions, and to discuss 
weighty interests, the fervour of passion was 
superadded to the inexperience of business. 

"Speedily the representative assemblies be- 
came the object of jealousy on the part of this 
democratic race; and the citizens of the re- 
public sought only to limit the powers which 
they had conferred on their representatives. 
Often the jealous multitude, terrified at the 
powers with which they had invested the de- 
puties, were seized with a sudden panic, and 
hastened together from all quarters with their 
arms in their hands to watch over their pro- 
ceedings. Such assemblies were styled ' Diets 
under the Buckler.' But generally they re- 
stricted and qualified their powers at the mo- 
ment of election. The electors confined their 
parliaments to a circle of limited questions: 
qave them obligatory directions; and held, after 
every session, what they called post-cornitial diets ; 
the object of which was to exact from every deputy 
a rigid account of the execution of his mandate. 
Thus every question of importance ivas, in effect, 
decided in the provinces before it teas debated in the 
national assembly. And as unanimity was still 
considered essential to a decision, the passing 
of any legislative act became impossible when 
there was any variance between the instruc- 
tions to the deputies. Thus the majority were 
compelled to disregard the protestations of the 



devoured all the food in the country, com- j minority ; and, to guard against that tyranny 
menced a civil war, and determined nothing, the only remedy seemed to establish, in favour 
The constant recurrence of such disasters at of the outvoted minority, the right of civil 
length led to an attempt to introduce territorial I war. Confederations were established ; armed 
deputies, invested with full power to carry on leagues, formed of discontented nobles, who 
the ordinary and routine business of the state, elected a marshal or president, and opposed 
But so adverse was any delegation of authority i decrees to decrees, force to force, diet to diet, 
to the original nature of Polish independence, | tribune to tribune; and had alternately the 
that this beneficial institution never was es- , king for its leader and its captive. What de- 
'ablished iu Poland but in the most incom- plorable institutions, which opened to all the 



56 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



discontented a legal channel for spreading 
anarchy through their country ! The only as- 
tonishing thing is, that the valour of the Polish 
nobility so long succeeded in concealing these 
mortal defects in their institutions. One 
would have imagined that a nation, under 
such customs, could not exist a year; and yet 
it seemed never weary either of victories or 
folly."— I. 116. 

No apology is necessary for the length of 
these quotations ; for they are not only illus- 
trative of the causes of the uniform disasters 
of Poland, but eminently instructive as to the 
tendency of democratic institutions all over 
the world. 

There is no danger that the inhabitants of 
England or France will flock in person to the 
opening of Parliament, and establish diets of 
two or three hundred thousand freemen, with 
sabres by their sides ; but there is a very great 
danger, that they will adopt the democratic 
jealousy of their representatives, and fix them 
down by fixed instructions to a course of con- 
duct which will both render nugatory all the 
advantages of a deliberative assembly, and 
sow the seeds of dissension, jealousy, and civil 
war between the different members of the 
state. This is the more to be apprehended, 
because this evil was felt in the strongest 
manner in France during the progress of the 
Revolution, and has appeared in America most 
remarkably even during the brief period of its 
political existence. 

The legislators of America are not in any 
sense statesmen; they are merely delegates, 
bound to obey the directions of their constitu- 
ents, and sent there to forward the individual 
interest of the province, district, or borough 
which they represent. Their debates are lan- 
guid and uninteresting; conducted with no 
idea whatever of convincing, but merely of 
showing the constituents of each member 
what he had done for his daily hire of seven 
dollars. The Constituents Assembly met, with 
cahiers or instructions to the deputies from all 
the electors ; and so much did this jealousy of 
the legislature increase with the progress of 
the movements in France, that the surest road 
to popularity with the electors was soon found 
to be, the most abject professions of submis- 
sion to their will. Every one knows how long 
and vehemently annual parliaments have been 
demanded by the English radicals, in order to 
give them an opportunity of constantly exer- 
cising this surveillance over their representa- 
tives ; and how many members of the present 
House of Commons are under a positive 
pledge to their constituents on more than one 
momentous question. It is interesting to ob- 
serve how much mankind, under all varieties 
of climate, situation, and circumstances, are 
governed by the same principles ; and to trace 
the working of the same causes in Polish an- 
archy, French revolutions, American selfish- 
ness, and British democracy. 

Whoever considers the matter dispassion- 
ately, and attends to the lessons of history, 
must arrive at the conclusion, that this demo- 
cratic spirit cannot co-exist with regular go- 
vernment or national independence in ancient 
states ; and that Polish anarchy is the neces- 1 



sary prelude in all such communities to Mus- 
covite oppression. The reason is eternal, and 
being founded in the nature of things, must be 
the same in all ages. When the true demo- 
cratic spirit is once generally diffused, men 
invariably acquire such an inordinate jeahusy 
of their riders, that they thwart all measures, 
even of the most obvious and undeniable utili- 
ty; and by a perpetual change of governors, 
gratify their own equalizing spirit, at the ex- 
pense of the best interests of the state. This 
disposition appears at present in France, and 
England, in the rapid changes of administra- 
tion which have taken place within the last 
few years, to the total destruction of any uni- 
formity of government, or the prosecution of 
any systematic plan for the public good: it 
appears in America in the execrable system 
of rotation of office, in other words, of the ex- 
pulsion of every man from official situations, 
the moment he becomes qualified to hold them, 
which a recent able observer has so well ex- 
posed;* it appeared in Poland in the uniform 
weakness of the executive, and periodical re- 
turns of anarchy, which rendered them, in 
despite of their native valour, unfortunate in 
every contest, and at last led to the partition 
of the republic. 

Never was there a truer observation, than 
that wherever the tendency of prevailing in- 
stitutions is hurtful, there is an under-current 
perpetually flowing, destined to correct them. 
As this equalising and democratic spirit is 
utterly destructive to the best interests of so- 
ciety, and the happiness of the very people 
who indulge in it, so by the wisdom of nature, 
it leads rapidly and certainly to its own de- 
struction. The moment that it became para- 
mount in the Roman Republic, it led to the 
civil convulsions which brought on the despo- 
tism of the Caesars ; its career was rapidly cut 
short in France by the sword of Napoleon ; it 
exterminated Poland from the book of nations ; 
it threatens to close the long line of British 
greatness; it will convulse or subjugate Ame- 
rica, the moment that growing republic is 
brought in contact with warlike neighbours, 
or finds the safety-valve of the back settle- 
ments closed against the escape of turbulent 
multitudes. 

The father of John Sobieski, whose estates 
lay in the Ukraine, has left a curious account 
of the manners and habits of the Cossacks in 
his time, which was about 200 years ago. 
" The great majority," said he, " of these wan- 
dering tribes, think of nothing but the affairs 
of their little families, and encamp, as it were, 
in the midst of the towns which belong to the 
crown or the noblesse. They interrupt the 
ennui of repose by frequent assemblies, and 
their comitia are generally civil wars, often at- 
tended by profuse bloodshed. It is there that 
they choose their hetman, or chief, by accla- 
mation, followed by throwing their bearskin 
caps in the air. Such is the inconstancy in the 
multitude, that they frequently destroy their 
own work ; but as long as the hetman remains 
in power, he has the right of life and death. 
The town of Tretchmiron, in Kiovia, is the 

* Captain Hall. 



POLAND. 



57 



arsenal of their warlike implements and their 
treasure. There is deposited the booty taken 
by their pirates in Komelia and Asia Minor; 
and there are also preserved, with religious 
care, the immunities granted to their nation 
by the republic. There are displayed the 
standards which the king sends them, when- 
ever they take up arms lor the service of the 
republic. It is round this royal standard that 
the nation assemble in their comilia. The het- 
man there does not presume to address the 
multitude but with his head uncovered, with a 
respectful air, ready to exculpate himself from 
all the charges brought against him, and to 
solicit humbly his sh # are of the spoils taken 
from the enemies. These fierce peasants are 
passionately fond of war; few are acquainted 
with the use of the musket ; the pistol and 
sabre are their ordinary weapons. Thanks to 
their light and courageous squadrons, Poland 
can face the infantry of the most powerful na- 
tions on earth. They are as serviceable in re- 
treat as in success ; when discomfited, they 
form, with their chariots ranged in several 
lines in a circular form, an entrenched camp, 
to which no other fortifications can be com- 
pared. Behind that tabor, they defy the at- 
tacks of the most formidable enemy." 

Of the species of troops who composed the 
Polish army, our author gives the following 
curious account, — a striking proof of the na- 
tional weakness which follows the fatal pas- 
sion for equality, which formed their grand 
national characteristic : 

"Five different kinds of soldiers composed 
the Polish army. There was, in the first place, 
the mercenaries, composed of Hungarians, 
Wallachians, Cossacks, Tartars, and Germans, 
who would have formed the strength and 
nucleus of the army, had it not been that on 
the least delay in their payments, they invari- 
ably turned their arms against the govern- 
ment: the national troops, to whose mainte- 
nance a fourth of the national revenue was 
devoted : the volunteers, under which name 
were included the levies of the great nobles, 
and the ordinary guards which they maintained 
in time of peace: the Pospnltte, that is, the 
array of the whole free citizens, who, after 
three summonses from the king, were obliged 
to come forth under the banners of their re- 
spective palatines, but only to remain a few 
months in the field, and could not be ordered 
beyond the frontiers. This last unwieldy 
body, however brave, was totally deficient in 
discipline, and in general served only to mani- 
fest the weakness of the republic. It was 
seldom called forth but in civil wars. The 
legions of valets, grooms, and drivers, who 
encumbered the other force, may be termed a 
fifth branch of the military force of Poland; 
but these fierce retainers, naturally warlike 
and irascible, injured the army more by their 
pillage and dissensions than they assisted it 
by their numbers. 

"All these different troops were deficient in 
equipment ; obliged to provide themselves 
with every thing, and to collect their subsist- 
ence by their own authority, they were encum- 
bered with an incredible quantity of baggage- 
wagons, destined, for the most part, less to 
8 



convey provisions than carry off plunder. 
They had no corps of engineers ; the artillery, 
composed of a few pieces of small calibre, had 
no other officers than a handful of French 
adventurers, upon whose adherence to the 
republic implicit reliance could not be placed. 
The infantry were few in number, composed 
entirely of the mercenary and royal troops; 
but this arm was regarded with contempt by 
the haughty nobility. The foot soldiers were 
employed in digging ditches, throwing bridges, 
and cutting down forests, rather than actual 
warfare. Sobieski was exceedingly desirous 
of having in his camp a considerable force of 
infantry ; but two invincible obstacles pre- 
vented it, — the prejudices of the country, and 
the penury of the royal treasury. 

" The whole body of the Pospolite, the vo- 
lunteers, the valets d'armec, and a large part of 
the mercenaries and national troops, served 
on horseback. The heavy cavalry, in particu- 
lar, constituted the strength of the armies ; 
there were to be found united, riches, splen- 
dour, and number. They were divided into 
cuirassiers and hussars ; the former clothed 
in steel, man and horse bearing casque and 
cuirass, lance and sabre, bows and carabines; 
the latter defended only by a twisted hauberk, 
which descended from the head, over the 
shoulders and breast, and armed with a sabre 
and pistol. Both were distinguished by the 
splendour of their dress and equipage, and the 
number and costly array of their mounted ser- 
vants, accoutred in the most bizarre manner, 
with huge black plumes, and skins of bears 
and other wild beasts. It was the boast of 
this body, that they were composed of men, 
all measured, as they expressed it, by the same 
standard ; that is, equal in nobility, equally 
enjoying the rights to obey only their God and 
their swords, and equally destined, perhaps, to 
step one day into the throne of the Piasts and 
the Jagellons. The hussars and cuirassiers 
were called Towarzirz, that is, companions; 
they called each other by that name, and they 
were designated in the same way by the sove- 
reign, whose chief boast would be Primus inter 
pares, the first among equals." — I. 129. 

With so motley and discordant a force, it is 
not surprising that Poland was unable to make 
head against the steady ambition and regular 
forces of the military monarchies with which 
it was surrounded. Its history accordingly 
exhibits the usual feature of all democratic 
societies — occasional bursts of patriotism, and 
splendid efforts followed by dejection, anarchy, 
and misrule. It is a stormy night illuminated 
by occasional flashes of lightning, never by 
the steady radiance of the morning sun. 

One of the most glorious of these flashes is 
the victory of Kotzim, the first great achieve- 
ment of John Sobieski. 

"Kotzim is a strong castle, situated four 
leagues from Kamaniek, on a rocky projection 
which runs into the Dneiper, impregnable 
from the river, and surrounded on the other 
side by deep and rocky ravines. A bridge 
thrown over one of them, united it to the en- 
trenched camp, where Hussein Pacha had 
posted his army. That camp, defended by 
ancient fieldworks, extended along the bank;; 



58 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



of the Dneiper, and was guarded on the side 
of Moldavia, the sole accessible quarter, by 
precipices cut in the solid rock, and impass- 
able morasses. The art of the Ottomans had 
added to the natural strength of the position ; 
the plain over which, after the example of the 
Romans, that military colony was intended to 
rule, was intersected to a great distance by 
canals and ditches, whose banks were strength- 
ened by palisades. A powerful artillery de- 
fended all the avenues to the camp, and there 
reposed, under magnificent tents, the Turkish 
generalissimo and eighty thousand veterans, 
when they were suddenly startled by the sight 
of the Polish banners, which moved in splendid 
array round their entrenchments, and took up 
a position almost under the fire of their artil- 
lery. 

"The spot was animating to the recollec- 
tions of the Christian host. Fifty years be- 
.fore, James Sobieski had conquered a glorious 
peace under the walls of that very castle : and 
against its ramparts, after the disaster of the 
Kobilta, the power of the young Sultan Osman 
had dashed itself in vain. Now the sides 
were changed ; the Turks held the entrenched 
camp, and the army of the son of James So- 
bieski filled the plain. 

" The smaller force had now to make the 
assault; the larger army was entrenched be- 
hind ramparts better fortified, better armed 
with cannon, than those which Sultan Osman 
and his three hundred thousand Mussulmen 
sought in vain to wrest from the feeble army 
of Wladislaus. The Turks were now grown 
gray in victories, and the assailants were 
young troops, for the most part ill armed, as- 
sembled in haste, destitute of resources, maga- 
zines, or provisions — worn out with the fatigues 
and the privations of a winter campaign. Deep 
ditches, the rocky bed of torrents, precipitous 
walls of rock, composed the field of battle on 
which they were called on to combat an enemy 
reposing tranquilly under the laurels of vic- 
tory, beneath sumptuous tents, and behind 
ramparts defended by an array of three hun- 
dred pieces of cannon. The night passed on 
the Polish side in mortal disquietude ; the 
mind of the general, equally with the soldiers, 
was overwhelmed with anxiety. The enter- 
prise which he had undertaken seemed above 
human strength; the army had no chance of 
safety but in victory, and there was too much 
reason to fear that treachery, or division in 
his own troops, would snatch it from his grasp, 
and deliver down his name with disgrace to 
posterity. 

"Sobieski alone was inaccessible to fear. 
When the troops were drawn forth on the fol- 
lowing morning, the Grand Hetman of Lithu- 
ania declared the attack desperate, and his 
resolution to retreat. 'Retreat,' cried the 
Polish hero, ' is impossible. We should only 
find a disgraceful death in the morasses with 
which we are surrounded, a few leagues from 
hence; better far to brave it at the foot of the 
enemy's entrenchments. But what ground is 
there for apprehension 1 Nothing disquiets 
me but what I hear from you. Your menaces 
are our only danger. I am confident you will 
not execute them. If Poland is to be effaced 



from the book of nations, you will not allow 
our children to exclaim, that if a Paz had not 
fled, they would not have wanted a country.' 
Vanquished by the magnanimity of Sobieski, 
and the cries of Sapieha and Radziwik, the 
Lithuanian chief promised not to desert his 
countrymen. 

"Sobieski then ranged his faltering batta- 
lions in order of battle, and the Turks made 
preparations to receive behind their entrench- 
ments the seemingly hopeless attack of the 
Christians. Their forces were ranged in a 
semicircle, and their forty field-pieces advanced 
in front, battered in breach the palisades which 
were placed across the approaches to the 
Turkish palisades. Kouski, the commander 
of the artillery, performed under the superior 
fire of the enemy, prodigies of valour. The 
breaches were declared practicable in the 
evening; and when night came, the Christian 
forces of the two principalities of Walachia 
and Moldavia deserted the camp of the Infi- 
dels, to range themselves under the standard 
of the cross ; a cheering omen, for troops 
never desert but to the side which they ima- 
gine will prove successful. 

" The weather was dreadful ; the snow fell 
in great quantities ; the ranks were obstructed 
by its drifts. In the midst of that severe tem- 
pest, Sobieski kept his troops under arms the 
whole night. In the morning they were buried 
in the snow, exhausted by cold and suffering. 
Thsn he gave the signal of attack. ' Com- 
panions, said he, in passing through the lines, 
his clothes, his hair, his mustaches covered 
with icicles, ' I deliver to you an enemy already 
half vanquished. You have suffered, the Turks 
are exhausted. The troops of Asia can never 
endure the hardships of the last twenty-four 
hours. The cold has conquered them to our 
hand. Whole troops of them are ahead}' sink- 
ing under their sufferings, while we, inured to 
the climate, are only animated by it to fresh 
exertions. It is for us to save the republic 
from shame and slavery. Soldiers of Poland, 
recollect that you fight for your country, and 
that Jesus Christ combats for you.' 

"Sobieski had thrice heard mass since the 
rising of the sun. The day was the fete of St. 
Martin of Tours. The chiefs founded great 
hopes on his intercession : the priests, who 
had followed their masters to the field of battle, 
traversed the ranks, recounting the actions of 
that great apostle of the French, and all that 
they might expect from his known zeal for the 
faith. He was a Slavonian by birth. Could 
there be any doubt, then, that the Christians 
would triumph when his glory was on that day 
in so peculiar a manner interested in perform- 
ing miracles in their favour] 

" An accidental circumstance gave the 
highest appearance of truth to these idea*. 
The Grand Marshal, who had just completed 
his last reconnoissance of the enemy's lines, 
returned with his countenance illuminated by 
the presage of victory — ' My companions,' he 
exclaimed, ' in half an hour we shall be lodged 
under these gilded tents.' In fact, he had dis- 
covered that the point against which he in- 
tended to direct his principal attack was not 
defended but by a few troops benumbed by the 



POLAND. 



59 



cold. He immediately made several feigned 
assaults to distract the attention of the enemy, 
and directed against the palisades, by which 
he intended to enter, the fire of a battery 
already erected. The soldiers immediately 
recollected that the preceding evening they 
had made the utmost efforts to draw the 
cannon beyond that point, but that a power 
apparently more than human had chained 
them to the spot, from whence now they easily 
beat down the obstacles to the army's ad- 
vance, and cleared the road to victory. Who 
was so blind as not to see in that circum- 
stance the miraculous intervention of Gregory 
of Tours ! 

" At that moment the army knelt down to re- 
ceive the benediction of Father Pizeborowski, 
confessor of the Grand Hetman ; and his 
prayer being concluded, Sobieski, dismount- 
ing from his horse, ordered his infantry to 
move forward to the assault of the newly- 
opened breach in the palisades, he himself, 
sword in hand, directing the way. The armed 
valets followed rapidly in their footsteps. That 
courageous band were never afraid to tread 
the path of danger in the hopes of plunder. 
In a moment the ditches were filled up and 
passed ; with one bound the troops arrived at 
the foot of the rocks. The Grand Hetman, 
after that first success, had hardly time to re- 
mount on horseback, when, on the heights of 
the entrenched camp, were seen the standard 
of the cross and the eagle of Poland. Petri- 
kowski and DenhofF, of the royal race of the 
Piasts, had first mounted the ramparts, and 
raised their ensigns. At this joyful sight, a 
hurrah of triumph rose from the Polish ranks, 
and rent the heavens ; the Turks were seized 
with consternation; they had been confounded 
at that sudden attack, made at a time when 
they imagined the severity of the weather had 
made the Christians renounce their perilous 
enterprise. Such was the confusion, that but 
for the extraordinary strength of the position, 
they could not have stood a moment. At this 
critical juncture, Hussein, deceived by a false 
attack of Czarnicki, hastened with his cavalry 
to the other side of the camp, and the spahis, 
conceiving that he was flying, speedily took to 
flight. 

"But the Janizzaries were not yet van- 
quished. Inured to arms, they rapidly formed 
their ranks, and falling upon the valets, who 
had dispersed in search of plunder, easily put 
them to the sword. Fortunately, Sobieski had 
had time to employ his foot soldiers in level- 
ling the ground, and rendering accessible the 
approaches to the summits of the hills. The 
Polish cavalry came rushing in with a noise 
like thunder. The hussars, the cuirassiers, 
with burning torches affixed to their lances, 
scaled precipices which seemed hardly acces- 
sible to foot soldiers. Inactive till that mo- 
ment, Paz now roused his giant strength. 
Ever the rival of Sobieski, he rushed forward 
with his Lithuanian nobles in the midst of 
every danger, to endeavour to arrive first in 
the Ottoman camp. It was too late ; — already 
the flaming lances of the Grand Hetman 
gleamed on the summits of the entrenchments, 
and ever attentive to the duties of a com- 



mander, Sobieski was employed in re-forming 
the ranks of the assailants, disordered by 
the assault and their success, and preparing 
for a new battle in the midst of that city of 
tents, which, though surprised, seemed not 
subdued. 

"But the astonishment and confusion of the 
besieged, the cries of the women, shut up in 
the Harems, the thundering charges of the 
heavy squadrons clothed in impenetrable steel, 
and composed of impetuous young men, gave 
the Turks no time to recover from their con- 
sternation. It was no longer a battle, but a 
massacre. Demetrius and the Lithuanian met 
at the same time in the invaded camp. A cry 
of horror now rose from the Turkish ranks, 
and they rushed in crowds to the bridge of 
boats which crossed the Dniester, and formed 
the sole communication between Kotzim, and 
the fortified city of Kamaniek. In the struggle 
to reach this sole outlet from destruction, mul- 
titudes killed each other. But Sobieski's fore- 
sight had deprived the vanquished even of this 
last resource. His brother-in-law, Radziwil, 
had during the tumult glided unperceived 
through the bottom of the ravines, and at the 
critical moment made himself master of the 
bridge, and the heights which commanded it. 
The only resource of the fugitives was now to 
throw themselves into the waves. 20,000 men 
perished at that fatal point, either on the shores 
or in the half-congealed stream. Insatiable in 
carnage, the hussars led by Maziniki pursued 
them on horseback into the bed of the Dneiper, 
and sabred thousands when struggling in the 
stream. 40,000 dead bodies were found in the 
precincts of the camp. The water of the river 
for several leagues ran red with blood, and 
corpses were thrown up with every wave on 
its deserted shores. 

"At the news of this extraordinary triumph, 
the Captain Pacha, who was advancing with 
a fresh army to invade Poland, set fire to his 
camp, and hastened across the Danube. The 
Moldavians and Walachians made their sub- 
mission to the conqueror, and the Turks, re- 
cently so arrogant, began to tremble for their 
capital. Europe, electrified with these suc- 
cesses, returned thanks for the greatest victory 
gained for three centuries over the infidels. 
Christendom quivered with joy, as if it had 
just escaped from ignominy and bondage." — 
II. 130—153. 

" But while Europe was awaiting the intel- 
ligence of the completion of the overthrow of 
the Osmanlis, desertion and flight had ruined 
the Polish army. Whole Palatinates had 
abandoned their colours. They were desirous 
to carry off in safety the spoils of the East, and 
to prepare for that new field of battle which 
the election of the King of Poland, who di»d 
at this juncture, presented. Sobieski remained 
almost alone on the banks of the Dniester. At 
the moment when Walachia and Moldavia 
were throwing themselves under the protec- 
tion of the Polish crown, when the Captain 
Pacha was flying to the foot of Balkan, and 
Sobieski was dreaming of changing the face 
of the world, his army dissolved. The Turks, 
at this unexpected piece of fortune, recovered 
from their terror ; and the rule of the Mussul 



60 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



men was perpetuated for two centuries in Eu- 
rope." — II. 165. 

This victory and the subsequent dissolution 
of the army, so characteristic both of the glo- 
ries and the inconstancy of Poland, great as it 
was, was eclipsed by the splendours of the de- 
liverance of Vienna. The account of the pre- 
vious election of this great man to the throne 
of Poland is singularly characteristic of Polish 
manners. 

"The plain of Volo to the west of Warsaw 
had been the theatre, from the earliest times, 
of the popular elections. Already the impa- 
tient Pospolite covered that vast extent with 
its waves, like an army prepared to commence 
an assault on a fortified town. The innumera- 
ble piles of arms; the immense tables round 
which faction united their supporters; a 
thousand jousts with the javelin or the lance; 
a thousand squadrons engaged in mimic war; 
a thousand parties of palatines, governors of 
castles, and other dignified authorities who 
traversed the ranks distributing exhortations, 
party songs, and largesses ; a thousand caval- 
cades of gentlemen, who rode, according to 
custom, with their battle-axes by their sides, 
and discussed at the gallop the dearest in- 
terests of the republic; innumerable quarrels, 
originating in drunkenness, and terminating 
in blood: Such were the scenes of tumult, 
amusement, and war, — a faithful mirror of 
Poland, — which, as far as the eye could reach, 
filled the plain. 

" The arena was closed in by a vast circle 
of tents, which embraced, as in an immense 
girdle, the plain of Volo, the shores of the Vis- 
tula, and the spires of Warsaw. The horizon 
seemed bounded by a range of snowy moun- 
tains, of which the summits were portrayed in 
the hazy distance by their dazzling whiteness. 
Their camp formed another city, with its 
markets, its gardens, its hotels, and its monu- 
ments. There the great displayed their Orien- 
tal magnificence; the nobles, the palatines, 
vied with each other in the splendour of their 
horses and equipage ; and the stranger who 
beheld for the first time that luxury, worthy of 
the last and greatest of the Nomade people, 
was never weary of admiring the immense 
hotels, the porticoes, the colonnades, the gal- 
leries of painted or gilded stuffs, the castles 
of cotton and silk, with their draw-bridges, 
towers, and ditches. Thanks to the recent 
victory, a great part of these riches had been 
taken from the Turks. Judging from the 
multitude of stalls, kitchens, baths, audience 
chambers, the elegance of the Oriental archi- 
tecture, the taste of the designs, the profusion 
of gilded crosses, domes, and pagodas, you 
would imagine that the seraglio of some 
Eastern sultan had been transported by en- 
chantment to the banks of the Vistula. Vic- 
tory had accomplished this prodigy ; these 
were the tents of Mahomet IV., taken at the 
battle of Kotzim, and though Sobieski was 
absent, his triumphant arms surmounted the 
crescent of Mahomet. 

"The Lithuanians were encamped on the 
opposite shores of the Vistula; and their Grand 
Hetman, Michel Paz, had brought up his whole 
force to dictate laws, as it were, to the Polish 



crown. Sobieski had previously occupied the 
bridge over the river by a regiment of hussars, 
upon which the Lithuanians seized every 
house in the city which wealth could com- 
mand. These hostile dispositions were too 
significant of frightful disorders. War soon 
ensued in the midst of the rejoicings between 
Lithuania and Poland. Every time the oppo- 
site factions met, their strife terminated in 
bloodshed. The hostilities extended even to 
the bloody game of the Klopiches, which was 
played by a confederation of the boys in the 
city, or of pages and valets, who amused them- 
selves by forming troops, electing a marshal, 
choosing a field of battle, and fighting there to 
the last extremity. On this occasion they 
were divided into corps of Lithuanians and 
Poles, who hoisted the colours of their respec- 
tive states, got fire-arms to imitate more com- 
pletely the habits of the equestrian order, and 
disturbed the plain everywhere by their 
marches, or terrified it by their assaults. 
Their shock desolated the plain; the villages 
were in flames ; the savage huts of which the 
suburbs of Warsaw were then composed, were 
incessantly invaded and sacked in that terri- 
ble sport, invented apparently to inure the 
youth to civil war, and extend even to the 
slaves the enjoyments of anarchy. 

" On the day of the elections the three orders 
mounted on horseback. The princes, the 
palatines, the bishops, the prelates, proceeded 
towards the plain of Volo, surrounded by eighty 
thousand mounted citizens, any one of whom 
might, at the expiry of a few hours, find him- 
self King of Poland. They all bore in their 
countenances, even under the livery or ban- 
ners of a master, the pride arising from that 
ruinous privilege. The European dress no- 
where appeared on that solemn occasion. 
The children of the desert strove to hide the 
furs and skins in which they were clothed 
under chains of gold and the glitter of jewels. 
Their bonnets were composed of panther-skin, 
plumes of eagles or herons surmounted them: 
on their front were the most splendid precious 
stones. Their robes of sable or ermine were 
bound with velvet or silver: their girdle 
studded with jewels; overall their furs were 
suspended chains of diamonds. One hand of 
each nobleman was without a glove ; on it was 
the splendid ring on which the arms of his 
family were engraved ; the mark, as in ancient 
Rome, of the equestrian order. A new proof 
of this intimate connection between th.fr race, 
the customs, and the traditions of the northern 
tribes, and the founders of the Eternal City. 

" But nothing in this rivalry of magnificence 
could equal the splendour of their arms. 
Double poniards, double scymitars, set with 
brilliants ; bucklers of costly workmanship, 
battle-axes enriched in silver, and glittering 
with emeralds and sapphires; bows and arrows 
richly gilt, which were borne at festivals, ii* 
remembrance of the ancient customs of the 
country, were to be seen on every side. The 
horses shared in this melange of barbarism 
and refinement; sometimes cased in iron, at 
others decorated with the richest colours, they 
bent under the weight of the sabres, the lances, 
and javelins by which the senatorial order 



POLAND. 



61 



marked their rank. The bishops were distin- 
guished by their gray or green hats, and yellow 
or red pantaloons, magnificently embroidered 
with divers colours. Often they laid aside 
their pastoral habits, and signalized their ad- 
dress as young cavaliers, by the beauty of their 
arms, and the management of their horses. 
In that crowd of the equestrian order, there 
was no gentleman so humble as not to try to 
rival this magnificence. Many carried, in furs 
and arms, their whole fortunes on their backs. 
Numbers had sold their votes to some of the 
candidates, for the vanity of appearing with 
some additional ornament before their fellow- 
citizens. And the people, whose dazzled eyes 
beheld all this magnificence, were almost with- 
out clothing; their long beards, naked legs, 
and filth, indicated, even more strongly than 
their pale visages and dejected air, all the 
miseries of servitude." — II. 190 — 197. 

The achievement which has immortalized 
the name of John Sobieski is the deliverance 
of Vienna in 1683 — of this glorious achieve- 
ment M. Salvandy gives the following interest- 
ing account: — 

"After a siege of eight months, and open 
trenches for sixty days, Vienna was reduced 
to the last extremity. Famine, disease, and 
the sword, had cut off two-thirds of its garri- 
son ; and the inhabitants, depressed by inces- 
sant toil for the last six months, and sickened 
by long deferred hope, were given up to des- 
pair. Many breaches were made in the walls; 
the massy bastions were crumbling in ruins, 
and entrenchments thrown up in haste in the 
streets, formed the last resource of the German 
capital. Stahremborg, the governor, had an- 
nounced the necessity of surrendering if not 
relieved in three days ; and every night signals 
of distress from the summits of the steeples, 
announced the extremities to which they were 
reduced. 

" One evening, the sentinel who was on the 
watch at the top of the steeple of St. Stephen's, 
perceived a blazing flame on the summits of 
the Calemberg; soon after an army was seen 
preparing to descend the ridge. Every tele- 
scope was instantly turned in that direction, 
and from the brilliancy of their lances, and the 
splendour of their banners it was easy to see 
that it was the Hussars of Poland, so redoubt- 
able to the Osmanlis, who were approaching. 
The Turks were immediately to be seen divid- 
ing their vast host into divisions, one destined 
to oppose this new enemy, and one to continue 
the assaults on the besieged. At the sight of 
the terrible conflict which was approaching, 
the women and children flocked to the 
churches, while Stahremborg led forth all that 
remained of the men to the breaches. 

"The Duke of Lorraine had previously set 
forth with a few horsemen to join the King of 
Poland, and learn the art of war, as he ex- 
pressed it, under so great a master. The two 
illustrious commanders soon concerted a plan 
of operations, and Sobieski encamped on the 
Danube, with all his forces, united to the 
troops of the empire. It was with tears of joy, 
that the sovereigns, generals, and the soldiers 
-of the Imperialists received the illustrious 
chief whom heaven had sent to their relief. 



Before his arrival discord reigned in their 
camp, but all now yielded obedience to the 
Polish hero. 

" The Duke of Lorraine had previously con- 
structed at Tulin, six leagues below Vienna, 
a triple bridge, which Kara Mustapha, the 
Turkish commander, allowed to be formed 
without opposition. The German Electors 
nevertheless hesitated to cross the river ; the 
severity of the weather, long rains, and roads 
now almost impassable, augmented their 
alarms. But the King of Poland was a stranger 
alike to hesitation as fear; the state of Vienna 
would admit of no delay. The last despatch 
of Stahremborg was simply in these words : 
'There is no time to lose.' — 'There is no re- 
verse to fear,' exclaimed Sobieski ; ' the gene- 
ral who at the head of three hundred thousand 
men could allow that bridge to be constructed 
in his teeth, cannot fail to be defeated.' 

"On the following day the liberators of 
Christendom passed in review before their 
allies. The Poles marched first ; the specta- 
tors were astonished at the magnificence of 
their arms, the splendour of the dresses, and 
the beauty of the horses. The infantry was 
less brilliant; one regiment in particular, by 
its battered appearance, hurt the pride of the 
monarch — ' Look well at those brave men,' 
said he to the Imperialists ; ' it is an invincible 
battalion, who have sworn never to renew 
their clothing, till they are arrayed in the spoils 
of the Turks.' These words were repeated to 
the regiments ; if they did not, says the annal- 
ist, clothe them, they encircled every man 
with a cuirass. 

"The Christian army, when all assembled, 
amounted to 70,000 men, of whom only 30,000 
were infantry. Of these the Poles were 18,000. 
— The principal disquietude of the king was 
on account of the absence of the Cossacks, 
whom Mynzwicki had promised to bring up to 
his assistance. — He well knew what admirable 
scouts they formed: the Tartars had always 
found in them their most formidable enemies. 
Long experience in the Turkish wars had 
rendered them exceedingly skilful in this 
species of warfare : no other force was equal 
to them in seizing prisoners and gaining in- 
telligence. They were promised ten crowns 
for every man they brought in after this man- 
ner: they led their captives to the tent of their 
king, where they got their promised reward, 
and went away saying, 'John, I have touched 
my money, God will repay you.' — Bereaved of 
these faithful assistants, the king was com- 
pelled to expose his hussars in exploring the 
dangerous defiles in which the army was about 
to engage. The Imperialists, who could not 
comprehend his attachment to that undisci- 
plined militia, were astonished to hear him 
incessantly exclaiming, ' Oh ! Mynzwicki, Oh ' 
Mynzwicki.' " 

A rocky chain, full of narrow and precipitous 
ravines, of woods and rocks, called the Calem- 
berg in modern times, the Mons iEtius of the 
Romans, separated the two armies : the cause 
of Christendom from that of Mahomet. It was 
necessary to scale that formidable barrier; for 
the mountains advanced with a rocky front 
into the middle of the Danube. Fortunately, 



62 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



the negligence of the Turks had omitted to 
fortify these posts, where a few battalions 
might have arrested the Polish army. 

" Nothing could equal the confidence of the 
Turks but the disquietude of the Imperialists. 
Such was the terror impressed by the vast 
host of the Mussulmen, that at the first cry of 
Allah ! whole battalions took to flight. Many 
thousand peasants were incessantly engaged 
in levelling the roads over the mountains, or 
cutting through the forest. The foot soldiers 
dragged the artillery with their arms, and M'ere 
compelled to abandon the heavier pieces. 
Chiefs and soldiers carried each his own pro- 
visions: the leaves of the oak formed the sole 
subsistence of the horses. Some scouts reach- 
ed the summit of the ridge long before the 
remainder of the army, and from thence be- 
held the countless myriads of the Turkish 
tents extending to the walls of Vienna. Ter- 
rified at the sight, they returned in dismay, 
and a contagious panic began to spread 
through the army. The king had need, to re- 
assure his troops, of all the security of his 
countenance, the gaiety of his discourse, and 
the remembrance of the multitudes of the 
infidels whom he had dispersed in his life. 
The Janizzaries of his guard, who surrounded 
him on the march, were so many living monu- 
ments of his victories, and every one was 
astonished that he ventured to attack the Mus- 
sulmen with such an escort. He offered to 
send them to the rear, or even to give them a 
safe conduct to the Turkish camp, but they all 
answered with tears in their eyes, ihat they 
would live and die with him. His heroism 
subjugated alike Infidels and Christians, chiefs 
and soldiers. 

"At length, on Saturday, September 11th, 
the army encamped, at eleven o'clock in the 
forenoon, on the sterile and inhospitable sum- 
mit of the Calemberg, and occupied the con- 
vent of Camaldoli and the old castle of Leo- 
poldsburg. Far beneath extended the vast and 
uneven plain of Austria: its smoking capital, 
the gilded tents, and countless host of the 
besiegers ; while at the foot of the ridge, where 
the mountain sunk into the plain, the forests 
and ravines were occupied by the advanced 
guards, prepared to dispute the passage of the 
army." 

There it was that they lighted the fires which 
spread joy and hope through every heart at 
Vienna. 

"Trusting in their vast multitudes, the 
Turks pressed the assault of Vienna on the 
one side, while on the other they faced the 
liberating army. The Turkish vizier counted 
in his ranks four Christian princes and as 
many Tartar chiefs. All the nobles of Ger- 
many and Poland were on the other side : 
Sobieski was at once the Agamemnon and 
Achilles of that splendid host. 

"The young Eugene of Savoy made his first 
essay in arms, by bringing to Sobieski the in- 
telligence that the engagement was commenced 
between the advanced guards at the foot of 
the ridge. The Christians immediately de- 
scended the mountains in five columns like 
torrents, but marching in the finest order: the 
leading divisions halted at every hundred 



paces to give time to those behind, who were 
retarded by the difficulties of the descent, to 
join them. A rude parapet, hastily erected by 
the Turks to bar the five debouches of the 
roads into the plain, was forced after a short 
combat. At every ravine, the Christians ex- 
perienced fresh obstacles to surmount : the 
spahis dismounted to contest the rocky ascents, 
and speedily regaining their horses when they 
were forced, fell back in haste to the next 
positions which were to be defended. But the 
Mussulmen, deficient in infantry, could not 
withstand the steady advance and solid masses 
of the Germans, and the Christians everywhere 
gained ground. Animated by the continued 
advance of their deliverers, the garrison of 
Vienna performed miracles on the breach; 
and Kara Mustapha, avIio long hesitated which 
battle he should join, resolved to meet the 
avenging squadrons of the Polish king. 

" By two o'clock the ravines were cleared, 
and the allies drawn up in the plain. Sobieski 
ordered the Duke of Lorraine to halt, to give 
time for the Poles, who had been retarded by 
a circuitous march, to join the army. At 
eleven they appeared, and took their post on 
the right. The Imperial eagles saluted the 
squadrons of gilded cuirasses with cries of 
' Long live King John Sobieski !' and the cry, 
repeated along the Christian line, startled the 
Mussulmen force. 

" Sobieski charged in the centre, and di- 
rected his attack against the scarlet tent of the 
sultan, surrounded by his faithful squadrons — 
distinguished by his splendid plume, his bow, 
and quiver of gold, which hung on his shoul- 
der — most of all by the enthusiasm which his 
presence everywhere excited. He advanced, 
exclaiming, 'Non nobis, Domine, sed tibi sit 
gloria !' The Tartars and the spahis fled when 
they heard the name of the Polish hero re- 
peated from one end to the other of the Otto- 
man lines. ' By Allah,' exclaimed Sultan 
Gieray, 'the king is with them!' At this 
moment the moon was eclipsed, and the Ma- 
hometans beheld with dread the crescent 
waning in the heavens. 

"At the same time, the hussars of Prince 
Alexander, who formed the leading column, 
broke into a charge amidst the national cry, 
' God defend Poland !' The remaining squad- 
rons, led by all that was noblest and bravest in 
the country, resplendent in arms, buoyant in 
courage, followed at the gallop. They cleared, 
without, drawing bridle, a ravine, at which in- 
fantry might have paused, and charged furi- 
ously up the opposite bank. With such 
vehemence did they enter the enemy's ranks, 
that they fairly cut the army in two, — justiiy- 
ing thus the celebrated saying of that haughty 
nobility to one of their kings, that with their 
aid no reverse was irreparable ; and that if the 
heaven itself were to fall, they would support 
it on the points of their lances. 

"The shock was so violent that almost all 
the lances were splintered. The Pachas of 
Aleppo and of Silistria were slain on the spot; 
four other pachas fell under the sabres of 
Jablonowski. At the same time Charles of 
Lorraine had routed the force of the principa- 
lities, and threatened the Ottoman camp. Kara 



POLAND. 



Mustapha fell at once from the heights of 
confidence to the depths of despair. 'Can 
you not aid me?' said he to the Kara of the 
Crimea. ' I know the King of Poland,' said 
he, ' and I tell you, that with such an enemy 
we have no chance of safety but in flight.' 
Mustapha in vain strove to rally his troops ; 
all, seized with a sudden panic, fled, not daring 
to lift their eyes to heaven. The cause of 
Europe, of Christianity, of civilization, had 
prevailed. The wave of the Mussulman power 
had retired, and retired never to return. 

" At six in the evening, Sobieski entered the 
Turkish camp. He arrived first at the quar- 
ters of the vizier. At the entrance of that vast 
enclosure a slave met him, and presented him 
with the charger and golden bridle of Musta- 
pha. He took the bridle, and ordered one of 
his followers to set out in haste for the Queen 
of Poland, and say that he who owned that 
bridle was vanquished ; then planted his 
standard in the midst of that armed caravan- 
sera of all the nations of the East, and ordered 
Charles of Lorraine to drive the besiegers 
irom the trenches before Vienna. It was 
already done; the Janizzaries had left their 
posts on the approach of night, and, after sixty 
days of open trenches, the imperial city was 
delivered. 

" On the following morning the magnitude 
of the victory appeared. One hundred and 
twenty thousand tents were still standing, not- 
withstanding the attempts at their destruction 
by the Turks ; the innumerable multitude of 
the Orientals had disappeared ; but their spoils, 
their horses, their camels, their splendour, 
loaded the ground. The king at ten approached 
Vienna. He passed through the breach, where- 
by but for him on that day the Turks would 
have found an entrance. At his approach the 
streets were cleared of their ruins; and the 
people, issuing from their cellars and their 
tottering houses, gazed with enthusiasm on 
their deliverer. They followed him to the 
church of the Augustins, where, as the clergy 
had notarrived, the king himself chanted Tc 
Devm. This service was soon after performed 
with still greater solemnity in the cathedral of 
St. Stephen ; the king joined with his face to 
the ground. It was there that the priest used 
the inspired words— 'There was a man sent, 
from heaven, and his name was John.' "—III. I 
50, 101. • 



During this memorable campaign, Sobieski, 
who through life was a tender and affectionate 
husband, wrote daily to his wife. At the a<*e 
of fifty-four he had lost nothing of the tender- 
ness and enthusiasm of his earlier years. In 
one of them he says, "I read all your letters, 
my dear and incomparable Maria, thrice over ; 
once when I receive them, once when I retire' 
to my tent and am alone with my love, once 
when I sit down to answer them. I beseech 
you, my beloved, do not rise so early; no 
health can stand such exertions ; if you do, 
you will destroy my health, and what is worse, 
injure your own, which is my sole consola- 
tion in this world." When offered the throne 
of Poland, it was at first proposed that he 
should divorce his wife, and marry the widow 
of the late king, to reconcile the contending 
faction. " I am not yet a king," said he, " and 
have contracted no obligations towards the 
nation: Let them resume their gift; I disdain 
the throne if it is to be purchased at such a 
price." 

It is superfluous, after these quotations, to 
say any thing of the merits of M. Salvandy's 
work. It unites, in a rare degree, the qualities 
of philosophical thought with brilliant and 
vivid description ; and is one of the numerous 
instances of the vast superiority of the Modern 
French Historians to most of those of whom 
Great Britain, in the present age, can boast. 
If any thing could reconcile us to the march 
of revolution, it is the vast development of 
talent which has taken place in France since 
her political convulsions commenced, and the 
new field which their genius has opened up 
in historical disquisitions. On comparing the 
historians of the two countries since the resto- 
ration, it seems as if they were teeming with 
the luxuriance of a virgin soil; while we are 
sinking under the sterility of exhausted cul- 
tivation. Steadily resisting, as we trust we 
shall ever do, the fatal march of French in- 
novation, we shall yet never be found wanting 
in yielding due praise to the splendour of 
French talent; and in the turn which political 
speculation has recently taken among the 
most elevated minds in their active metropolis, 
we are not without hopes that the first rays 
of the dawn are to be discerned, which is 
destined to compensate to mankind for the 
darkness and blood of the revolution. 



64 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



MADAME DE STAEL/ 



Amidst the deluge of new and ephemeral 
publications under which the press both in 
France and England is groaning, and the 
woful depravity of public taste, in all branches 
of literature, which in the former country has 
followed the Revolution of the Three Glorious 
Days, it is not the least important part of the 
duty of all those who have any share, however 
inconsiderable, in the direction of the objects 
to which public thought is to be applied, to 
recur from time to time to the great and 
standard works of a former age; and from 
amidst the dazzling light of passing meteors 
in the lower regions of the atmosphere, to 
endeavour to direct the public gaze to those 
fixed luminaries whose radiance in the higher 
heavens shines, and ever will shine, in im- 
perishable lustre. From our sense of the im- 
portance and utility of this attempt, we are 
not to be deterred by the common remark, 
that these authors are in everybody's hands ; 
that their works are read at school, and their 
names become as household sounds. We 
know that many things are read at school 
which are forgotten at college ; and many 
things learned at college which are unhappily 
and permanently discarded in later years; and 
that there are many authors whose names are 
as household sounds, whose works for that 
very reason are as a strange and unknown 
tongue. Every one has heard of Racine and 
Moiiere, of Bossuet and Fenelon, of Voltaire 
and Rousseau, of Chateaubriand and Madame 
de Stae'l, of Pascal and Rabelais. We would 
beg to ask even our best informed and most 
learned readers, with how many of their works 
they are really familiar; how many of their 
felicitous expressions have sunk into their 
recollections; how many of their ideas are 
engraven on their memory] Others may 
possess more retentive memories, or more ex- 
tensive reading than we do ; but we confess, 
when we apply such a question, even to the 
constant study of thirty years, we feel not a 
little mortified at the time which has been 
misapplied, and the brilliant ideas once ob- 
tained from others which have now faded 
from the recollection, and should rejoice much 
to obtain from others that retrospect of past 
greatness which we propose ourselves to lay 
before our readers. 

Every one now is so constantly in the habit of 
reading the new publications, of devouring 
the fresh productions of the press, that we for- 
get the extraordinary superiority of standard 
works ; and are obliged to go back to the 
studies of our youth for that superlative en- 
joyment which arises from the perusal of 
authors, where every sentence is thought, and 
often every word conception ; where new trains 
of contemplation or emotion are awakened in 
every page, and the volume is closed almost 

* Elackwood's Magazine, June 1837. 



every minute to meditate on the novelty or 
justice of the reflections which arise from its 
study. And it is not on the first perusal of 
these authors that this exquisite pleasure is 
obtained. In the heyday of youth and strength, 
when imagination is ardent, and the world 
unknown, it is the romance of the story, or the 
general strain of the argument which carries 
the reader on, and many of the finest and most 
spiritual reflections are overlooked or un- 
appreciated; but in later years, when life has 
been experienced, and joy and sorrow felt, 
when the memory is stored with recollections, 
and the imagination with images, it is reflec- 
tion and observation which constitute the chief 
attraction in composition. And judging of the 
changes wrought by Time in others from what 
we have experienced ourselves, we anticipate 
a high gratification, even in the best informed 
readers, by a direction of their attention to 
many passages in the great French writers of 
the age of Louis XIV. and the Revolution, a 
comparison of their excellences, a criticism 
on their defects, and an exposition of the 
mighty influence which the progress of poli- 
tical events has had upon the ideas reflected, 
even to the greatest authors, from the age in 
which they lived, and the external events 
passing around them. 

The two great eras of French prose litera- 
ture are those of Louis XIV. and the Revo- 
lution. If the former can boast of Bossuet, 
the latter can appeal to Chateaubriand: if the 
former still shine in the purest lustre in 
Fenelon, the latter may boast the more fervent 
pages, and varied genius of De Stae'l ; if the 
former is supreme in the tragic and comic 
muse, and can array Racine, Corneille and 
Moiiere, against the transient Lilliputians of 
the romantic school, the latter can show in 
the poetry and even the prose of Lamartine a 
condensation of feeling, a depth of pathos and 
energy of thought which can never be reached 
but in an age which has undergone the animat- 
ing episodes, the heart-stirring feelings conse- 
quent on social convulsion. In the branches of 
literature which depend on the relations of men 
to each other, history — politics — historical phi- 
losophy and historical romance, the superiority 
of the modern school is so prodigious, that it 
is impossible to find a parallel to it in former 
days: and even the dignified language and 
eagle glance of the Bishop of Meaux sinks 
into insignificance, compared to the vast ability 
which, in inferior minds, experience and actual 
suffering have brought to bear on the in- 
vestigation of public affairs. Modern writers 
were for long at a loss to understand the cause 
which had given such superior pathos, ener- 
gy, and practical wisdom to the historians of 
antiquity; but the French Revolution at once 
explained the mystery. When modern times 
were brought into collision with the passions 
and the suffering consequent on democratic 



MADAME DE STAEL. 



nscendency and social convulsion, they were 
not long of feeling the truths which experience 
had taught to ancient writers, and acquiring 
the power of vivid description and condensed 
yet fervent narrative by which the great his- 
torians of antiquity are characterized. 

At the head of the modern prose writers of 
France, we place Madame de Stael, Chateau- 
briand, and Guizot : The general style of the 
two first and the most imaginative of these 
writers — De Stael and Chateaubriand — is es- 
sentially different from that of Bossuet, Fenelon 
and Massillon. We have no longer either the 
thoughts, the language, or the images of these 
great and dignified writers ! With the pompous 
grandeur of the Grande Monarque ; with the 
awful splendour of the palace, and the irresisti- 
ble power of the throne ; with the superb mag- 
nificence of Versailles, its marbles, halls, and 
forests of statues, have passed away the train 
of thought by which the vices and corruption 
then chiefly prevalent in society were combated 
by these worthy soldiers of the militia of 
Christ. Strange to say, the ideas of that des- 
potic age are more condemnatory of princes; 
more eulogistic of the people, more con- 
firmatory of the principles which, if pushed to 
their legitimate consequences, lead to demo- 
cracy, than those of the age when the sove- 
reignty of the people was actually established. 
In their eloquent declamations, the wisdom, 
justice, and purity of the masses are the con- 
stant subject of eulogy; almost all social and 
political evils are traced to the corruptions of 
courts and the vices of kings. The applause 
of the people, the condemnation of rulers, in 
Telemachus, often resembles rather the frothy 
declamations of the Tribune in favour of the 
sovereign multitude, than the severe lessons 
addressed by a courtly prelate to the heir of a 
despotic throne. With a fearless courage 
worthy of the highest commendation, and very 
different from the base adulation of modern 
■times to the Baal of popular power, Bossuet, 
Massillon, and Bourdaloue, incessantly rung 
in the ears of their courtly auditory the equality 
of mankind in the sight of heaven and the 
awful words of judgment to come. These im- 
aginary and Utopian effusions now excite a 
smile, even in the most youthful student; and 
a suffering age, taught by the experienced 
■evils of democratic ascendency, has now 
learned to appreciate, as they deserve, the pro- 
found and caustic sayings in which Aristotle, 
Sallust, and Tacitus have delivered to future 
ages the condensed wisdom on the instability 
and tyranny of the popular rule, which a^es 
of calamity had brought home to the sages of 
antiquity. 

In Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand we 
have incomparably more originality and va- 
riety of thought; far more just and expe- 
rienced views of human affairs ; far more 
condensed wisdom, which the statesman and 
the philosopher may treasure in their memo- 
ries, than in the great writers of the age of 
Louis XIV. We see at once in their produc- 
tions that we are dealing with those who speak 
from experience of human affairs ; to whom 
years of suffering have brought centuries of 
wisdom ; and whom the stern school of adver- 



sity have learned to abjure both much of the 
fanciful El Dorado speculations of preceding 
philosophy, and the perilous effusions of suc- 
ceeding republicanism. Though the one was 
by birth and habit an aristocrat of the ancient 
and now decaying school, and the other, a 
liberal nursed at the feet of the great Gamaliel 
of the Revolution, yet there is no material dif- 
ference in their political conclusions; so com- 
pletely does a close observation of the progress 
of a revolution induce the same conclusions 
in minds of the highest stamp, with whatever 
early prepossessions the survey may have 
been originally commenced. The Dix Annees 
d'Exil, and the observations on the French 
revolution, might have been written by Cha- 
teaubriand, and Madame de Stael would have 
little wherefrom to dissent in the Monarchic 
selon la Charte, or later political writings of 
her illustrious rival. 

It is by their works of imagination, taste, 
and criticism, however, that these immortal 
writers are principally celebrated, and it is 
with them that we propose to commence this 
critical survey. Their names are universally 
known : Corinne, Delphine, De l'Allemagne, 
the Dix Annees d'Exil, and De la Litterature, 
are as familiar in sound, at least, to our ears, 
as the Genie de Christianisme, the Itineraire, 
the Martyrs, Atala et Rene of the far-travelled 
pilgrim of expiring feudalism, are to our 
memories. Each has beauties of the very 
highest cast in this department, and yet their 
excellences are so various, that we know not 
to which to award the palm. If driven to dis- 
criminate between them, we should say that 
De Stael has more sentiment, Chateaubriand 
more imagination ; that the former has deeper 
knowledge of human feelings, and the latter 
more varied and animated pictures of human 
manners ; that the charm of the former con- 
sists chiefly in the just and profound views of 
life, its changes and emotions with which her 
works abound, and the fascination of the latter 
in the brilliant phantasmagoria of actual 
scenes, impressions, and events which his 
writings exhibit. No one can exceed Madame 
de Stael in the expression of the sentiment or 
poetry of nature, or the development of the 
varied and storied associations which histori- 
cal scenes or monuments never fail to awaken 
in the cultivated mind ; but in the delineation 
of the actual features she exhibits, or the 
painting of the various and gorgeous scenery 
or objects she presents, she is greatly inferior 
to the aulhor of the Genius of Christianity. 
She speaks emotion to tne neart, not pictures 
to the eye. Chateaubriand, on the other hand, 
has dipped his pencil in the finest and most 
radiant hues of nature: with a skill surpassing 
even that of the Great Magician of ihe North, 
he depicts all the most splendid scenes of both 
hemispheres ; and seizing with the inspiration 
of genius on the really characteristic features 
of the boundless variety of objects he has 
visited, brings them before us with a force and 
fidelity which it is impossible to surpass. 
After all, however, on rising from a perusal 
of the great works of these two authors, it is 
hard to say which has left the most indelible 
impression on the mind ; for if the one has 
f2 



66 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



accumulated a store of brilliant pictures which 
have never yet been rivalled, the other has 
drawn from the objects on which she has 
touched all the most profound emotions which 
they could awaken; and if the first leaves a 
gorgeous scene painted on the mind, the latter 
has engraved a durable impression on the 
heart. 

Corinxe is not to be regarded as a novel. 
Boarding-school girls, and youths just fledged 
from college, may admire it as such, and dwell 
with admiration on the sorrows of the heroine 
and the faithlessness of Lord Nevil; but con- 
sidered in that view it has glaring faults, both 
in respect of fancy, probability, and story, and 
will bear no comparison either with the great 
novels of Sir Walter Scott, or the secondary 
productions of his numerous imitators. The 
real view in which to regard it is as a picture 
of Italy; its inhabitants, feelings, and recollec- 
tions ; its cloudless skies and glassy seas ; its 
forest-clad hills and sunny vales ; its umbra- 
geous groves and mouldering forms ; its heart- 
inspiring ruins and deathless scenes. As such 
it is superior to any work on that subject which 
has appeared in any European language. No- 
where else shall we find so rich and glowing 
an intermixture of sentiment with description ; 
of deep feeling for the beauty of art, with a 
correct perception of its leading principles ; 
of historical lore with poetical fancy; of ar- 
dour in the cause of social amelioration, with 
charity to the individuals who, under unfortu- 
nate institutions, are chained to a life of indo- 
lence and pleasure. Beneath the glowing sun 
and azure skies of Italy she has imbibed the 
real modern Italian spirit: she exhibits in the 
mouth of her heroine all that devotion to art, 
that rapturous regard to antiquity, that insou- 
ciance in ordinary life, and constant besoin of 
fresh excitement by which that remarkable 
people are distinguished from any other at 
present in Europe. She paints them as they 
really are ; living on the recollection of the 
past, feeding on the glories of their double set 
of illustrious ancestors ; at times exulting in 
the recollection of the legions which subdued 
the world, at others recurring with pride to 
the glorious though brief days of modern art ; 
mingling the names of Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, 
and Virgil with those of Michael Angelo, Ra- 
phael, Buonarotti, and Correggio ; repeating 
with admiration the stanzas of Tasso as they 
glide through the deserted palaces of Venice, 
and storing their minds with the rich creations 
of Ariosto's fancy as they gaze on the stately 
monuments of Rome. 

Not less vividly has she portrayed, in the 
language, feelings, and character of her he- 
roine, the singular intermixture with these 
animating recollections of all the frivolity 
which has rendered impossible, without a 
fresh impregnation of northern vigour, the 
regeneration of Italian society. We see in 
her pages, as we witness in real life, talents 
the most commanding, beauty the most fasci- 
nating, graces the most captivating, devoted 
to no other object but the excitement of a 
transient passion; infidelity itself subjected to 
certain restraints, and boasting of its fidelity 
fo one attachment; whole classes of society 



incessantly occupied with no other object but 
the gratification of vanity, the thraldom of at- 
tachment, or the imperious demands of beauty, 
and the strongest propensity of cultivated life, 
the besoin d'aimer, influencing, for the best part of 
their lives, the higher classes of both sexes. 
In such representation there would probably 
be nothing in the hands of an ordinary writer 
but frivolous or possibly pernicious details ; 
but by Madame de Stael it is touched on so 
gently, so strongly intermingled with senti- 
ment, and traced so naturally to its ultimate 
and disastrous effects, that the picture be- 
comes not merely characteristic of manners, 
but purifying in its tendency. 

The Dix Annees d'Exil, though abounding 
with fewer splendid and enchanting passages, 
is written in a higher strain, and devoted to 
more elevated objects than the Italian novel. 
It exhibits the Imperial Government of Napo- 
leon in the palmy days of his greatness ; when 
all the Continent had bowed the neck to his 
power, and from the rock of Gibraltar to the 
Frozen Ocean, not a voice dared to be lifted 
against his commands. It shows the internal 
tyranny and vexations of this formidable 
power ; its despicable jealousies and con- 
temptible vanity ; its odious restrictions and 
tyrannizing tendency. We see the censorship 
chaining the human mind to the night of the 
tenth in the opening of the nineteenth century; 
the commands of the police fettering every 
effort of independent thought and free discus- 
sion ; forty millions of men slavishly following 
the car of a victor, who, in exchange for all 
the advantages of freedom, hoped but never 
obtained from the Revolution, dazzled them 
with the glitter only of gilded chains. In her 
subsequent migrations through Tyrol, Poland, 
Russia, and Sweden, to avoid his persecution 
during the years which preceded the Russian 
war, we have the noblest picture of the ele- 
vated feelings which, during this period of 
general oppression, were rising up in the na- 
tions which yet preserved a shadow of inde- 
pendence, as well as of the heroic stand made 
by Alexander and his brave subjects against 
the memorable invasion which ultimately 
proved their oppressor's ruin. These are 
animating themes ; and though not in general 
inclined to dwell on description, or enrich her 
work with picturesque narrative, the scenery 
of the north had wakened profound emotions 
in her heart which appear in many touches 
and reflections of no ordinary sublimity. 

Chateaubriand addresses himself much more 
habitually and systematically to the eye. He 
paints what he has seen, whether in nature, 
society, manners, or art, with the graphic skill 
of a consummate draughtsman ; and produces 
the emotion he is desirous of awakening, not 
by direct words calculated to arouse it, but by 
enabling the imagination to depict to itself the 
objects which in nature, by their felicitous com- 
bination, produced the impression. Madame 
de Stael does not paint the features of the 
scene, but in a few words she portrays the 
emotion which she experienced on beholding 
it, and contrives by these few words to awaken 
it in her readers ; Chateaubriand enumerates 
with a painter's power all the features of the 



MADAME DE STAEL. 



67 



jcene, and by the vividness of description 
succeeds not merely in painting it on the 
retina of the mind, but in awakening there the 
precise emotion which he himself felt on 
beholding it. The one speaks to the heart 
through the eye, the other to the eye through 
the heart. As we travel with the illustrious 
pilgrim of the Revolution, we see rising before 
us in successive clearness the lonely temples, 
and glittering valleys, and storied capes of 
Greece; the desert plains and rocky ridges 
and sepulchral hollows of Judea; the solitary 
palms and stately monuments of Egypt; the 
isolated remains of Carthage, the deep solitudes 
of America, the sounding cataracts, and still 
lakes, and boundless forests of the TSie\v World. 
Not less vivid is his description of human 
scenes and actions, ofwhich, during his event- 
ful career, he has seen such an extraordinary 
variety; the Janissary, the Tartar, the Turk ; 
the Bedouins of the desert places, the Numi- 
dians of the torrid zone; the cruel revolution- 
ists of France ; the independent savages of 
America; the ardent mind of Napoleon, the 
dauntless intrepidity of Pitt. Nothing can 
exceed the variety and brilliancy of the pictures 
which he leaves engraven on the imagination 
of his reader; but he has neither touched the 
heart nor convinced the judgment like the 
profound hand of his female rival. 

To illustrate these observations we have 
selected two of the most brilliant descriptions 
from Chateaubriand's Genie de Christianisme, 
and placed beside these two of the most in- 
spired of Madame de StaeTs passages on 
Roman scenery. We shall subjoin two of the 
most admirable descriptions by Sir Walter 
Scott, that the reader may at once have pre- 
sented to his view the masterpieces, in the 
descriptive line, of the three greatest authors 
of the age. All the passages are translated by 
ourselves; we have neither translations at 
hand, nor inclination to mar so much elo- 
quence by the slovenly dress in which it usual- 
ly appears in an English version. 

"There is a God! The herbs of the valley, 
the cedars of the mountain, bless him — the 
insect sports in his beams — the elephant 
salutes him with the rising orb of day — the 
bird sings him in the foliage — the thunder 
proclaims him in the heavens — the ocean de- 
clares his immensity — man alone has said, 
' There is no God !' 

"Unite in thought, at the same instant, the 
most beautiful objects in nature ; suppose that 
you see at once all the hours of the day, and 
all the seasons of the year; a morning of 
spring and a morning of autumn ; a night be- 
spangled with stars, and a night covered with 
clouds ; meadows enamelled with flowers, 
forests hoary with snow; fields gilded by the 
tints of autumn ; then alone you will have a 
just conception of the universe. While you 
are gazing on that sun which is plunging under 
the vault of the west, another observer admires 
him emerging from the gilded gates of the east. 
By what unconceivable magic does that aged 
star, which is sinking fatigued and burning in 
the shades of the evening, reappear at the same 
instant fresh and humid with the rosy dew of 
the morning? At every instant of the day the 



glorious orb is at once rising — resplendent at 
noonday, and setting in the west ; or rather 
our senses deceive us, and there is, properly 
speaking, no east, or south, or west, in the 
world. Every thing reduces itself to one single 
point, from whence the King of Day sends 
forth at once a triple light in one single sub- 
stance. The bright splendour is perhaps that 
which nature can present that is most beauti- 
ful ; for while it gives us an idea of the per- 
petual magnificence and resistless power of 
God, it exhibits, at the same time, a shining 
image of the glorious Trinity." 

Human eloquence probably cannot, in de- 
scription, go beyond this inimitable passage; 
but it is equalled in the pictures left us by the 
same author of two scenes in the New World. 

" One evening, when it was a profound calm, 
we were sailing through those lovely seas 
which bathe the coast of Virginia, — all the 
sails were furled — I was occupied below whea 
I heard the bell which called the mariner^ 
upon deck to prayers — I hastened to join my 
orisons to those of the rest of the crew. The 
officers were on the forecastle, with the passen- 
gers ; the priest, with his prayer-book in his 
hand, stood a little in advance ; the sailors were 
scattered here and there on the deck ; we were 
all above, with our faces turned towards the 
prow of the vessel, which looked to the west. 

"The globe of the sun, ready to plunge into 
the waves, appeared between the ropes of the 
vessel in the midst of boundless space. You 
would have imagined, from the balancing of 
the poop, that the glorious luminary changed 
at every instant its horizon. A few light clouds 
were scattered without order in the east, where 
the moon was slowly ascending ; all the rest of 
the sky was unclouded. Towards the north, 
forming a glorious triangle with the star of day 
and that of night, a glittering cloud arose from 
the sea, resplendent with the colours of the 
prism, like a crystal pile supporting the vault 
of heaven. 

" He is much to be pitied who could have 
witnessed this scene, without feeling the beau- 
ty of God. Tears involuntarily flowed from 
my eyes, when my- companions, taking off 
their hats, began to sing, in their hoarse strains, 
the simple hymn of Our Lady of Succour. 
How touching was that prayer of men, who, 
on a fragile plank, in the midst of the ocean, 
contemplated the sun setting in the midst of 
the waves ! How that simple invocation of the 
mariners to the mother of woes, went to the 
heart ! The consciousness of our littleness 
in the sight of Infinity — our chants prolonged 
afar over the waves — night approaching with 
its sable wings — a whole crew of a vessel 
filled with admiration and a holy fear — God 
bending over the abyss, with one hand retain- 
ing the sun at the gates of the west, with the 
other raising the moon in the east, and yet 
lending an attentive ear to the voice of prayer 
ascending from a speck in the immensity — all 
combined to form an assemblage which can- 
not be described, and of which the human 
heart could hardly bear the weight. 

" The scene at land was not less ravishing 
One evening I had lost my way in a forest, as 
a short distance from the Falls of Niagara. 



68 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Soon the day expired around me, and I tasted, 
in all its solitude, the lovely spectacle of a 
night in the deserts of the New World. 

" An hour after sunset the moon showed it- 
self above the branches, on the opposite side 
of the horizon. An embalmed breeze, which 
the Queen of Night seemed to bring with her 
from the East, preceded her with its freshen- 
ing gales. The solitary star ascended by de- 
grees in the heavens ; sometimes she followed 
peaceably her azure course, sometimes she 
reposed on the groups of clouds, which re- 
sembled the summits of lofty mountains covered 
with snow. These clouds, opening and clos- 
ing their sails, now spread themselves out in 
transparent zones of white satin, now dis- 
persed into light bubbles of foam, or formed 
in the heavens bars of white so dazzling and 
sweet, that you could almost believe you felt 
their snowy surface. 

" The scene on the earth was of equal beau- 
ty ; the declining day, and the light of the moon, 
descended into the intervals of the trees, and 
spread a faint gleam even in the profoundest 
part of the darkness. The river which flowed 
at my feet, alternately lost itself in the woods, 
and reappeared brilliant with the constella- 
tions of night which reposed on its bosom. In 
a savanna on the other side of the river, the 
moonbeams slept without movement on the 
verdant turf. A few birches, agitated by the 
breeze, and dispersed here and there, formed 
isles of floating shadow on that motionless sea 
of light. All would have been in profound 
repose, but for the fall of a few leaves, the 
breath of a transient breeze, and the moaning 
of the owl ; while, in the distance, at intervals 
the deep roar of Niagara was heard, which, 
prolonged from desert to desert in the calm of 
the night, expired at length in the endless 
solitude of the forest. 

"The grandeur, the surpassing melancholy 
Df that scene, can be expressed by no human 
tongue — the finest nights of Europe can give 
no conception of it. In vain, amidst our cul- 
tivated fields, does the imagination seek to ex- 
pand — it meets on all sides the habitations of 
men; but in those savage regions the soul 
Joves to shroud itself in the ocean of forests, 
to hang over the gulf of cataracts, to meditate 
on the shores of lakes and rivers, and feel 
itself alone as it were with God. 

'PrjEsentiorem conspicimus Deum, 
Fera per juga, clivosque prreruptos, 
Sonantes inter aquas nemorumque noctem.' " 

We doubt if any passages ever were written 
of more thrilling descriptive eloquence than 
these ; hereafter we shall contrast them with 
some of the finest of Lamartine, which have 
equalled but not exceeded them. But now 
mark the different style with which Madame 
de Stae'l treats the heart-stirring monuments 
of Roman greatness. 

"At this moment St. Peter arose to their 
view; the greatest edifice which man has ever 
raised, for the Pyramids themselves are of less 
considerable elevation. I would perhaps have 
done better, said Corinne, to have taken you 
to the most beautiful of our edifices last; but 
that is not my system. I am convinced that, 
to render one alive to the charm of the fine 



arts, we should commence with those objects 
which awaken a lively and profound admira- 
tion. When, once that sentiment has been 
experienced, a new sphere of ideas is awaken- 
ed, which renders us susceptible of the im- 
pression produced by beauties of an inferior 
order; they revive, though in a lesser degree, 
the first impression which has been received. 
All these gradations in producing emotion are 
contrary to my opinion; you do not arrive at 
the sublime by successive steps; infinite de- 
grees separate it from the beautiful. 

" Oswald experienced an extraordinary emo- 
tion on arriving in front of the facade of St. 
Peter's. It was the first occasion on which a 
work of human hands produced on him the 
effects of one of the marvels of nature. It is 
the only effort of human industry which has 
the grandeur which characterizes the imme- 
diate works of the Creator. Corinne rejoiced 
in the astonishment of Oswald. 'I have 
chosen,' said she, ' a day when the sun was 
shining in all its eclat to show you this monu- 
ment for the first time. I reserve for you a 
more sacred religious enjoyment, to contem- 
plate it by the light of the moon ; but at this 
moment it was necessary to obtain your pre- 
sence at the most brilliant of our fetes, the 
genius of man decorated by the magnificence 
of nature.' 

" The Place of St. Peter is surrounded by 
columns, which appear light at a distance, but 
massy when seen near. The earth, which 
rises gently to the gate of the church, adds to 
the effect it produces. An obelisk of eighty 
feet in height, which appears as nothing in 
presence of the cupola of St. Peter's, is in the 
middle of the place. The form of obelisks 
has something in it which is singularly pleas- 
ing to the imagination; their summit loses 
itself in the clouds, and seems even to elevate 
to the Heavens a great thought of man. That 
monument, which was brought from Egypt to 
adorn the baths of Caracalla, and which Sex- 
tus V. subsequently transported to the foot of 
the Temple of St. Peter ; that contemporary 
of so many ages which have sought in vain to 
decay its solid frame, inspires respect ; man 
feels himself so fleeting, that he always expe- 
riences emotion in presence of that which has 
passed unchanged through many ages. At a 
little distance, on each side of the obelisk, are 
two fountains, the waters of which perpetually 
are projected up and fall down in cascades 
through the air. That murmur of waters, 
which is usually heard only in the field, pro- 
duces in such a situation a new sensation; 
but one in harmony with that which arises 
from the aspect of so majestic a temple. 

" Painting or sculpture, imitating in general 
the human figure, or some object in external 
nature, awaken in our minds distinct and posi- 
tive ideas ; but a beautiful monument of archi- 
tecture has not any determinate expression, 
and the spectator is seized, on contemplating 
it, with that reverie, without any definite ob- 
ject, which leads the thoughts so far off. The 
sound of the waters adds to these vague and 
profound impressions ; it is uniform, as the 
edifice is regular. 

' Eternal movement and eternal repose' 



MADAME DE STAEL. 



69 



are thus brought to combine with each other. 
It is here, in au especial manner, that Time is 
without power; it never dries up those spark- 
ling streams ; it never shakes those immovable 
pillars. The waters, which spring up in fan- 
like luxuriance from these fountains, are so 
light and vapoury, that, in a fine day, the rays 
of the sun produce little rainbows of the most 
beautiful colour. 

" Stop a moment here, said Corinne to Lord 
Nelvii, as he stood under the portico of the 
church ; pause before drawing aside the cur- 
tain which covers the entrance of the Temple. 
Does not your heart beat at the threshold of 
that sanctuary! Do you not feel, on entering 
it, the emotion consequent on a solemn event 1 
At these words Corinne herself drew aside the 
curtain, and held it so as to let Lord Nelvii 
enter. Her attitude was so beautiful in doing so, 
that for a moment it withdrew the eyes of her lover 
even from the majestic interior of the Temple. But 
as he advanced, its greatness burst upon his 
mind, and the impression which he received 
under its lofty arches was so profound, that the 
sentiment of love was for a time effaced. He 
walked slowly beside Corinne ; both were 
silent. Everything enjoined contemplation; 
the slightest sound resounded so far, that no 
word appeared worthy of being repeated in 
those eternal mansions. Prayer alone, the 
voice of misfortune was heard at intervals in 
their vast vaults. And, when under those 
stupendous domes, you hear from afar the 
voice of an old man, whose trembling steps 
totter along those beautiful marbles, watered 
with so many tears, you feel that man is ren- 
dered more dignified by that very infirmity of 
his nature which exposes his divine spirit to 
so many kinds of suffering, and that Chris- 
tianity, the worship of grief, contains the true 
secret of man's sojourn upon earth. 

" Corinne interrupted the reverie of Oswald, 
and said to him, 'You have seen the Gothic 
churches of England and Germany, and must 
have observed that they are distinguished by a 
much more sombre character than this cathe- 
dral. There is something mystical in the Ca- 
tholicism of these Northern people ; ours 
speaks to the imagination by exterior objects. 
Michael Angelo said, on beholding the cupola 
of the Pantheon, 'I will place it in the air;' 
and, in truth, St. Peter's is a temple raised on 
the basement of a church. There is a certain 
alliance of the ancient worship with Christi- 
anity in the effect which the interior of that 
church produces: I often go to walk here 
alone, in order to restore to my mind the tran- 
quillity it may have lost. The sight of such a 
monument is like a continual and fixed music, 
awaiting you to pour its balm into your mind, 
whenever you approach it ; and certainly, 
among the man]' titles of this nation to glory, 
we must number the patience, courage, and 
disinterestedness of the chiefs of the church, 
who consecrated, during a hundred and fifty 
years, such vast treasures and boundless 
labour to the prosecution of a work, of which 
none of them could hope to enjoy the fruits.'" 
— Corinne, vol. i. c. 3. 

In this magnificent passage, the words un- 
derlined are an obvious blemish. The idea 



of Oswald turning aside at the entrance of St. 
Peter's from the gaze of the matchless interior 
of the temple, a spectacle unique in the world, 
to feast his eye by admiration of his inamorata, 
is more than we, in the frigid latitudes of the 
north, can altogether understand. But Ma- 
dame de Stael was a woman, and a French- 
woman ; and apparently she could not resist 
the opportunity of signalizing the triumph of 
her sex, by portraying the superiority of female 
beauty to the grandest and most imposing ob- 
ject that the hands of man have ever reared. 
Abstracting from this feminine weakness, the 
passage is one of almost uniform beauty, and 
well illustrates the peculiar descriptive style 
of the author ; not painting objects, but touch- 
ing the cords which cause emotions to vibrate. 
She has unconsciously characterized her own 
style, as compared with that of Chateaubriand, 
in describing the different characters of the 
cathedrals of the North and South.—" There is 
something mystical in the Catholicism of the 
Northern people ; ours speaks to the imagina- 
tion by exterior objects." 

As another specimen of Madame de Stael's 
descriptive powers, take her picture of the 
Appian Way, with its long lines of tombs on 
either side, on the southern quarter of Rome. 

"She conducted Lord Nelvii beyond the 
gates of the city, on the ancient traces of the 
Appian Way. These traces are marked in 
the middle of the Campagna of Rome by 
tombs, on the right and left of which the ruins 
extend as far as the eye can reach for several 
miles beyond the walls. Cicero says that, on 
leaving the gate, the first tombs you meet are 
those of Metellus, the Scipios, and Servillius. 
The tomb of the Scipios has been discovered 
in the very place which he describes, and 
transported to the Vatican. Yet it was, in 
some sort, a sacrilege to displace these illus- 
trious ashes ; imagination is more nearly allied 
than is generally imagined to morality; we 
must beware of shocking it. Some of these 
tombs are so large, that the houses of peasants 
have been worked out in them, for the Romans 
consecrated a large space to the last remains 
of their friends and their relatives. They 
were strangers to that arid principle of utility 
which fertilizes a few corners of earth, the 
more by devastating the vast domain of senti- 
ment and thought. 

"You see at a little distance from the Ap- 
pian Way a temple raised by the Republic to 
Honour and Virtue ; another to the God which 
compelled Hannibal to remeasure his steps; 
the Temple of Egeria, where Numa went to 
consult his tutelar deity, is at a little distance 
on the left hand. Around these tombs the 
traces of virtue alone are to be found. No 
monument of the long ages of crime which 
disgraced the empire are to be met with be- 
side the places where these illustrious dead 
repose; they rest amongst the relics of the 
republic. 

"The aspect of the Campagna around Rome 
has something in it singularly remarkable. 
Doubtless it is a desert; there are neither 
trees nor habitations ; but the earth is covered 
with a profusion of natural flowers, which 
the energy of vegetation renews incessanUy 



70 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



These creeping plants insinuate themselves 
among the tombs, decorate the ruins, and 
seem to grow solely to do honour to the dead. 
You would suppose that nature, was too proud 
there to suffer the labours of man, since Cin- 
cinnati^ no longer holds the plough which 
furrows its bosom; it produces flowers in 
wild profusion, which are of no sort of use to 
the existing generation. These vast unculti- 
vated planes will doubtless have few attrac- 
tions for the agriculturist, administrators, and 
all those who speculate on the earth, with a 
view to extract from it the riches it is capable 
of affording; but the thoughtful minds, whom 
death occupies as much as life, are singularly 
attracted by the aspect of that Campagna, 
where the present times have left no trace; 
that earth which cherishes only the dead, and 
covers them in its love with useless flowers — 
plants which creep along the surface, and 
never acquire sufficient strength to separate 
themselves from the ashes, which they have the 
appearance of caressing." — Corinne, 1. v. c. 1. 

How many travellers have traversed the 
Appian Way, but how few have felt the deep 
impressions which these words are fitted to 
produce ! 

" The churches of modern Rome," continues 
the same author, " are decorated with the mag- 
nificence of antiquity, but there is something 
sombre and striking in the intermingling of 
these beautiful marbles with the ornaments 
stripped from the Pagan temples. The columns 
of porphyry and granite were so numerous at 
Rome that they ceased to have any value. At 
St. John Lateran, that church, so famous from 
the councils of which it was the theatre, there 
were such a quantity of marble columns that 
many of them were covered with plaster to be 
converted into pilasters — so completely had 
the multitude of riches rendered men indiffer- 
ent to them. Some of these columns came 
from the tomb of Adrian, and bear yet upon 
their capitals the mark of the geese which 
saved the Roman people. These columns 
support the ornaments of Gothic churches, 
and some rich sculptures in the arabesque 
order. The urn of Agrippa has received the 
ashes of a pope, for the dead themselves have 
yielded their place to other dead, and the tombs 
have changed tenants nearly as often as the 
mansions of the living. 

" Near to St. John Lateran is the holy stair, 
transported from Jerusalem. No one is per- 
mitted to go up it but on his knees. In like 
manner Oesar and Claudius ascended on their 
knees the stair which led to the temple of Ju- 
piter Capitolinus. Beside St. John Lateran is 
the Baptistery, where Constantine was bap- 
tized — in the middle of the place before the 
church is an obelisk, perhaps the most ancient 
monument which exists in the world — an obe- 
lisk contemporary of the War of Troy — an 
obelisk which the barbarian Cambyses re- 
spected so much as to stop for its beauty the 
conflagration of a city — an obelisk for which 
a king put in pledge the life of his only son. 
The Romans in a surprising manner got it 
conveyed from the extremity of Egypt to Italy 
— they turned aside the course of the Nile to 
bring its waters so as to convey it to the sea. 



Even then that obelisk was covered with 
hieroglyphics whose secrets have been kept 
for so many ages, and which still withstand 
the researches of our most learned scholars. 
Possibly the Indians, the Egyptians, the anti- 
quity of antiquity, might be revealed to us in 
these mysterious signs. The wonderful charm 
of Rome consists, not merely in the beauty of 
its monuments, but in the interest which they 
all awaken, and that species of charm increases 
daily with every fresh study." — Ibid. c. 3. 

We add only a feeble prosaic translation of 
the splendid improvisatore effusion of Corinne 
on the Cape of Mesinum, surrounded by the 
marvels of the shore of Bake and the Phleg- 
riari fields. 

" Poetry, nature, history, here rival each 
other in grandeur — here you can embrace in 
a single glance all the revolutions of time and 
all its prodigies. 

"I see the Lake of Avernus, the extin- 
guished crater of a volcano, whose waters 
formerly inspired so much terror — Acheron, 
Phlegeton, which a subterraneous flame caused 
to boil, are the rivers of the infernals visited 
by .<Eneas. 

" Fire, that devouring element which created 
the world, and is destined to consume it, was 
formerly an object of the greater terror that 
its laws were unknown. Nature, in the olden 
times, revealed its secrets to poetry alone. 

" The city of Cumoe, the Cave of the Sibylle, 
the Temple of Apollo, were placed on that 
height. There grew the wood whence was 
gathered the golden branch. The country of 
J3neas is around you, and the fictions conse- 
crated by genius have become recollections of 
which we still seek the traces. 

"A Triton plunged into these waves the 
presumptive Trojan who dared to defy the di- 
vinities of the deep by his songs — these water- 
worn and sonorous rocks have still the cha- 
racter which Virgil gave them. Imagination 
was faithful even in the midst of its omnipo- 
tence. The genius of man is creative when 
he feels Nature — imitative when he fancies he 
is creating. 

" In the midst of these terrible masses, gray 
witnesses of the creation, we see a new moun- 
tain which the volcano has produced. Here 
the earth is storary as the ocean, and does 
not, like it, re-enter peaceably into its limits. 
The heavy element, elevated by subterraneous 
fire, fills up valleys, 'rains mountains,' anq. its 
petrified waves attest the tempests which once 
tore its entrails. 

"If you strike on this hill the subterraneous 
vault resounds — you would say that the in- 
habited earth is nothing but a crust ready to 
opeu and swallow us up. The Campagna of 
Naples is the image of human passion — sul- 
phurous, but fruitful, its dangers and its plea- 
sures appear to grow out of those glowing 
volcanoes which give to the air so many 
charms, and cause the thunder to roll beneath 
our feet. 

"Pliny boasted that his country was the 
most beautiful in existence — he studied nature 
to be able to appreciate its charms. Seeking 
the inspiration of science as a warrior does 
conquest, he set forth from this promontory to 



MADAME DE STAEL. 



71 



observe Vesuvius athwart the flames, and 
those flames consumed him. 

"Cicero lost his life near the promontory 
of Gaeta, which is seen in the distance. The 
Triumvirs, regardless of posterity, bereaved 
it of the thoughts which that great man had 
conceived — it was on us that his murder was 
committed. 

" Cicero sunk beneath the poniards of ty- 
rants — Scipio, more unfortunate, was banished 
by his fellow-citizens while still m the enjoy- 
ment of freedom. He terminated his days 
near that shore, and the ruins of his tomb are 
still called the 'Tower of our Country.' What 
a touching allusion to the last thought of that 
great spirit! 

" Marius fled into those nWshes not far from 
the last home of Scipio. Thus in all ages the 
people have persecuted the really great; but 
they are avenged by their apotheosis, and the 
Roman who conceived their power extended 
even unto Heaven, placed Romulus, Numa, 
and Caesar in the firmament — new stars which 
confound in our eyes the rays of glory and the 
celestial radiance. 

" Oh, memory ! noble power ! thy empire is 
in these scenes! From age to age, strange 
destiny ! man is incessantly bewailing what 
he has lost ! These remote ages are the de- 
positaries in their turn of a greatness which is 
no more, and while the pride of thought, glory- 
ing in its progress, darts into futurity, our soul 
seems still to regret an ancient country to 
which the past in some degree brings it 
back." — Lib. xii. c. 4. 

Enough has now been given to give the un- 
lettered reader a conception of the descriptive 
character of these two great continental 
writers — to recall to the learned one some of 
the most delightful moments of his life. To 
contplete the parallel, we shall now present 
three of the finest passages of a similar cha- 
racter from Sir Walter Scott, that our readers 
may be able to appreciate at a single sitting 
the varied excellences of the greatest masters 
of poetic prose who have appeared in modern 
times. 

The first is the well-known opening scene 
of Ivanhoe. 

"The sun was setting upon one of the rich 
grassy glades of that forest, which we have 
mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. 
Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, 
wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed per- 
haps the stalely march of the Roman soldiery, 
flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet 
of the most delicious green sward; in some 
places they were intermingled with beeches, 
hollies, and copsewood of various descrip- 
tions, so closely as totally to intercept the level 
beams of the sinking sun ; in others they re- 
ceded from each other, forming those long 
sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the 
eye delights to lose itself, while imagination 
considers them as the paths to yet wilder 
scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays 
of the sun shot a broken and discoloured light, 
that partially hung upon the shattered boughs 
and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they 
illuminated in brilliant patches the portions 
of turf to which they made their way. A con- 



siderable open space, in the midst of this glade, 
seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the 
rites of Druidical superstition ; for, on the sum- 
mit of a hillock, so regular as to seem artificial, 
there still remained part of a circle of rough 
unhewn stones, of large dimensions. Seven 
stood upright ; the rest had been dislodged 
from their places, probably by the zeal of 
some convert to Christianity, and lay, some 
prostrate near their former site, and others on 
the side of the hill. One large stone only had 
found its way to the bottom, and in stopping 
the course of a small brook, which glided 
smoothly round the foot of the eminence, gave, 
by its opposition, a feeble voice of murmur to 
the placid and elsewhere silent streamlet." 

The next is the equally celebrated descrip- 
tion of the churchyard in the introductory 
chapter of Old Mortality. 

" Farther up the narrow valley, and in a re- 
cess which seems scooped out of the side of 
the steep heathy bank, there is a deserted 
burial-ground which the little cowards are 
fearful of approaching in the twilight. To 
me, however, the place has an inexpressible 
charm. It has been long the favourite termi- 
nation of my walks, and, if my kind patron 
forgets not his promise, will (and probably at 
no very distant day) be my final resting-place 
after my mortal pilgrimage. 

" It is a spot which possesses all the solem- 
nity of feeling attached to a burial-ground, 
without exciting those of a more unpleasing 
description. Having been very little used for 
many years, the few hillocks which rise above 
the level plain are covered with the" same 
short velvet turf. The monuments, of which 
there are not above seven or eight, are half 
sunk in the ground and overgrown with moss. 
No newly-erected tomb disturbs the sober se- 
renity of our reflections, by reminding us of 
recent calamity, and no rank springing grass 
forces upon our imagination the recollection, 
that it owes its dark luxuriance to the foul and 
festering remnants of mortality which ferment 
beneatfo The daisy which sprinkles the sod, 
and the hair-bell which hangs over it, derive 
their pure nourishment from the dew of Heaven, 
and their growth impresses us with no degrad- 
ing or disgusting recollections. Death has in- 
deed been here, and its traces are before us; 
but they are softened and deprived of their 
horror by our distance from the period when 
they have been first impressed. Those who 
sleep beneath are only connected with us by 
the reflection, that they have once been what 
we now are, and that, as their relics are now 
identified with their mother earth, ours shall, 
at some future period, undergo the same trans- 
formation." 

The third is a passage equally we!! known, 
but hardly less beautiful, from the Antiquary. 
"The sun was now resting his huge disk 
upon the edge of the level ocean, and gilded 
the accumulation of towering clouds through 
which he had travelled the livelong day, and 
which now assembled on all sides, like mis- 
fortunes and disasters around a sinking em- 
pire, and falling monarch. Still, however, his 
dying splendour gave a sombre magnificence 
to the massive congregation of vapours, form- 



72 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



ing out of their unsubstantial gloom, the show 
of pyramids and towers, some touched with 
gold, some with purple, some with a hue of 
deep and dark red. The distant sea, stretched 
beneath this varied and gorgeous canopy, lay 
almost portentously still, reflecting back the 
dazzling and level beams of the descending 
luminary, and the splendid colouring of the 
clouds amidst which he was sitting. Nearer 
to the beach, the tide rippled onward in waves 
of sparkling silver, that imperceptibly, yet ra- 
pidly, gained upon the sand. 

" With a mind employed in admiration of 
the romantic scene, or perhaps on some more 
agitating topic, Miss Wardour advanced in 
silence by her father's side, whose recently 
offended dignity did not stoop to open any 
conversation. Following the windings of the 
beach, they passed one projecting point or 
headland of rock after another, and now found 
themselves under a huge and continued extent 
of the precipices by which that iron-bound 
coast is in most places defended. Long pro- 
jecting reefs of rock, extending under water, 
and only evincing their existence by here and 
there a peak entirely bare, or by the breakers 
which foamed over those that were partially 
covered, rendered Knockwinnock bay dreaded 
by pilots and ship-masters. The crags which 
rose between the beach and the mainland, to 
the height of two or three hundred feet, af- 
forded in their crevices shelter for unnum- 
bered sea-fowl, in situations seemingly secured 
by their dizzy height from the rapacity of man. 
Many of these wild tribes, with the instinct 
which sends them to seek the land before a 
storm arises, were now winging towards their 
nests with the shrill and dissonant clang which 
announces disquietude and fear. The disk of 
the sun became almost totally obscured ere he 
had altogether sunk below the horizon, and an 
early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the 
serene twilight of a summer evening. The 
wind began next to arise ; but its wild and 
moaning sound was heard for some time, and 
its effects became visible on the bosom of the 
sea, before the gale was felt on shore. The 
mass of waters, now dark and threatening, 
began to lift itself in larger ridges, and sink in 
deeper furrows, forming waves that rose high 
in foam upon the breakers, or bursting upon 
the beach with a sound resembling distant 
thunder." 

Few objects are less beautiful than a bare 
sheet of water in heathy hills, but see what it 
becomes under the inspiration of genius. 

"It was a mild summer clay; the beams of 
the sun, as is not uncommon in Zetland, were 
moderated and shaded by a silver}' haze, which 
fdled the atmosphere, and, destroying the strong 
contrast of light and shade, gave even to noon 
the sober livery of the evening twilight. The 



little lake, not three-quarters of a mile in cir- 
cuit, lay in profound quiet; its surface un- 
dimpled, save when one of the numerous 
water-fowl, which glided on its surface, dived 
for an instant under it. The depth of the water 
gave the whole that cerulean tint of bluish 
green, which occasioned its being called the 
Green Loch ; and at present, it formed so per 
feet a mirror to the bleak hills by which it was 
surrounded, and which lay reflected on its 
bosom, that it was difficult to distinguish the 
water from the land; nay, in the shadowy- 
uncertainty occasioned by the thin haze, a 
stranger could scarce have been sensible that 
a sheet of water lay before him. A scene of 
more complete solitude, having all its pecu- 
liarities heightened by the extreme serenity of 
the weather, the quiet gray composed tone of 
the atmosphere, and the perfect silence of the 
elements, could hardly be imagined. The 
very aquatic birds, who frequented the spot in 
great numbers, forbore their usual flight and 
screams, and floated in profound tranquillity 
upon the silent water." 

It is hard to say to which of these mighty 
masters of description the palm should be 
awarded. Scott is more simple in his lan- 
guage, more graphic in his details, more 
thoroughly imbued with the character of the 
place he is desirous of portraying: Chateau- 
briand is more resplendent in the images 
which he selects, more fastidious in the fea- 
tures he draws, more gorgeous from the mag- 
nificence with which he is surrounded : Ma- 
dame de Stae'l, inferior to both in the power 
of delineating nature, is superior to either in 
rousing the varied emotions dependent on his- 
torical recollections or melancholy impres- 
sions. It is remarkable that, though she is a 
southern writer, and has thrown into Corinne 
all her own rapture at the sun and the recol- 
lections of Italy, yet it is with a northern eye 
that she views the scenes it presents — it is not 
with the living, but the mighty dead, that she 
holds communion — the chords she loves to 
strike are those melancholy ones which vi- 
brate more strongly in a northern than a 
southern heart. Chateaubriand is imbued 
more largely with the genuine spirit of the 
south: albeit a Frank by origin, he is filled 
with the spirit of Oriental poetry. His soul 
is steeped in the cloudless skies, and desultory 
life, and boundless recollections of the East. 
Scott has no decided locality. He has struck 
his roots into the human heart — he has de- 
scribed Nature with a master's hand, under 
whatever aspects she is to be seen ; but his 
associations are of Gothic origin; his spirit is 
of chivalrous descent ; the nature which he 
has in general drawn is the sweet gleam of 
sunshine in a northern climate. 



NATIONAL MONUMENT& 



73 



NATIONAL MONUMENTS/ 



Thb history of mankind, from its earliest 
period to the present moment, is fraught with 
proofs of one general truth, that it is in small 
states, and in consequence of the emulation 
and ardent spirit which they develop, that the 
human mind arrives at its greatest perfection, 
and that the freest scope is afforded both to the 
o-randeur of moral, and the brilliancy of intel- 
lectual character. It is to the citizens of small 
republics that we are indebted both for the 
o-reatest discoveries which have improved the 
condition or elevated the character of man- 
kind, and for the noblest examples of private 
and public virtue with which the page of his- 
tory is adorned. It was in the republics of 
ancient Greece, and in consequence of the 
emulation which was excited among her 
rival cities, that the beautiful arts of poetry, 
sculpture, and architecture were first brought 
to perfection; and while the genius of the hu- 
man race was slumbering among the innume- 
rable multitudes of the Persian and Indian 
monarchies, the single city of Athens produced 
a succession of great men, whose works have 
improved and delighted the world m every 
succeeding age. While the vast feudal mo- 
narchies of Europe were buried in ignorance 
and barbarism, the little states of Florence 
Bologna, Rome, and Venice were far advanced 
in the career of arts and in the acquisition ot 
knowledge; and at this moment, the traveller 
neglects the boundless but unknown tracts of 
Germany and France, to visit the tombs of 
Raphael, and Michael Angelo, and Tasso, to 
dwell in a country where every city and every 
landscape reminds him of the greatness of 
human genius, or the perfection of human 
taste. It is from the same cause that the 
earlier history of the Swiss confederacy exhi- 
bits a firmness and grandeur of political cha- 
racter which we search for in vain in the 
annals of the great monarchies by which they 
are surrounded, that the classical pilgrim 
pauses awhile in his journey to the Eternal 
City to do homage to the spirit of its early re- 
publics, and sees not in the ruins which, at the 
termination of his pilgrimage, surround him, 
the remains of imperial Rome, the mistress 
and the capital of the world; but of Rome, 
when struggling with Corioli and Veil ; of 
Rome, when governed by Regulus and Cincin- 
na tus— and traces the scene of her infant wars 
with the Latian tribes, with a pious interest, 
which all the pomp and magnificence of her 
subsequent history has not been able to excite. 
Examples of this kind have often led histo- 
rians to consider the situation of small re- 
publics as that of all others most adapted to 
the exaltation and improvement of mankind. 



To minds of an ardent and enthusiastic cast, 
who delight in the contemplation of human 
genius, or in the progress of public improve- 
ment, the brilliancy and splendour of such 
little states form the most delightful of all ob- 
jects ; and accordingly, the greatest of living 
historians,™ his history of the Italian republics, 
has expressed a decided opinion that in no 
other situation is such scope afforded to the 
expansion of the human mind, or such facility 
afforded to the progressive improvement of our 



^O-Tthe other hand, it is not to be concealed, 



♦ Blackwood's Magazine, July 1S10. ami Edinburgh 
Review August lS^.'— Written when the National Mo- 
numents in London and Edinburgh to the late war were 
in contemplation, and in review of the Earl ot Aberdeen - 
Essay on Grecian architecture. 
10 



that such little dynasties are accompanied by 
many circumstances of continued and aggra- 
vated distress. Their small dimensions, and 
the jealousies which subsist betwixt them, not 
only furnish the subject of continual disputes, 
but aggravate to an incredible degree the 
miseries and devastations of war. Between 
such states, it is not conducted with the dig- 
nity and in the spirit which characterizes the 
efforts of great monarchies, but rather with the 
asperity and rancour which belong to a civil 
contest. While the frontiers only of a great 
monarchy suffer from the calamities of war, 
its devastations extend to the very heart ot 
smaller states. Insecurity and instability fre- 
quently mark the internal condition of these 
republics ; and the activity which the histo- 
rian admires in their citizens, is too often em- 
ployed in mutually destroying and pi aging 
each other, or in disturbing the tranquillity of 
the state. It is hence that the sunny slopes 
of the Apennines are everywhere crowned by 
castellated villages, indicating the universality 
of the ravages of war among the Italian btates 
in former times; and that the architecture of 
Florence and Genoa still bears the character 
of that massy strength which befitted the period 
when every noble palace was an independent 
fortress, and when war, tumult, and violence, 
reigned for centuries within their walls; 
while the open villages and straggling cottages 
of England bespeak the security with which 
her peasants have reposed under the shadow 
of her redoubted power. 

The universality of this fact has led many 
wise and good men to regard small states as 
the prolific source of human suffering; and to 
conclude that all the splendour, whether in arts 
or in science, with which they are surrounded, 
is dearly bought at the expense of the peace 
and tranquillity of the great body of the peo- 
ple. To such men it appears, that the periods 
of history on which the historian dwells, or 
which have been marked by extraordinary 
genius, are not those in which the grates 
public, happiness has been enjoyed ; bu that 
| t is in be found rather under the quiet and 
inglorious government of a great and pacific 

empire. , , • v ,.<- 

Without pretending to determine which ot 

these opinions is the best founded, it is mortr 



74 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



important for our present purpose to observe, 
that the union of the three kingdoms in the 
British Empire, promises to combine for this 
country the advantages of both these forms of 
government without the evils to which either 
is exposed. While her insular situation, and 
the union and energy of her people, secure for 
Great Britain peace and tranquillity within 
her own bounds, the rivalry of the different 
nations of whom the empire is composed, pro- 
mises, if properly directed, to animate her 
people with the ardour and enterprise which 
have hitherto been supposed to spring only 
from the collision of smaller states. 

Towards the accomplishment of this most 
desirable object, however, it is indispensable 
that each nation should preserve the remem- 
brance of its own distinct origin, and look to 
the glory of its own people, with an anxious and 
peculiar care. It is quite right that the Scotch 
should glory with their aged sovereign in the 
name of Britain : and that, when considered 
with reference to foreign states, Britain should 
exhibit a united whole, intent only upon up- 
holding and extending the glory of that empire 
which her united forces have formed. But it 
is equally important that her ancient metro- 
polis should not degenerate into a provincial 
town; and that an independent nation, once 
the rival of England, should remember, with 
pride, the peculiar glories by which her people 
have been distinguished. Without this, the 
whole good effects of the rivalry of the two 
nations will be entirely lost ; and the genius 
of her different people, in place of emulating 
and improving each other, Avill be drawn into 
one centre, where all that is original and cha- 
racteristic will be lost in the overwhelming 
influence of prejudice and fashion. 

Such an event would be an incalculable 
calamity to the metropolis, and to the genius 
of this country. It is this catastrophe which 
Fletcher of Salton so eloquently foretold, when 
he opposed the union with England in the 
Scottish Parliament. Edinburgh would then 
become like Lyons, or Toulouse, or Venice, a 
provincial town, supported only by the occa- 
sional influx of the gentlemen in its neighbour- 
hood, and the business of the courts of law 
which have their seat within its walls. The 
city and the nation which have produced or 
been adorned by David Hume, Adam Smith, 
Robert Burns, Dugald Stewart, Principal Ro- 
bertson, and Walter Scott, would cease to exist ; 
and the traveller would repair to her classical 
scenes, as he now does to Venice or Ferrara, 
to lament the decay of human genius which 
follows the union of independent states. 

Nor would such an event be less injurious 
to the general progress of science and arts 
throughout the empire. It is impossible to 
doubt, that the circumstance of Scotland being 
a separate kingdom, and maintaining a rival- 
ship with England, has done incalculable good 
to both countries — that it has given rise to a 
succession of great men, whose labours have 
tnlightened and improved mankind, who 
would not otherwise have acted upon the 
career of knowledge. Who can say what 
would have been the present condition of 
England in philosophy or science, if she had 



not been stimulated by the splendid progress 
which Scotland was making ? and who can 
calculate the encouragement which Scottish 
genius has derived from the generous applause 
which England has always lavished upon her 
works 1 As Scotchmen, we rejoice in the ex- 
altation and eminence of our own country ; 
but we rejoice not less sincerely in the literary 
celebrity of our sister kingdom ; not only from 
the interest which, as citizens of the united 
empire, Ave feel in the celebrity of any of its 
members, but as affording the secret pledges 
of the continued and progressive splendour of 
our own country. 

It is impossible, however, to contemplate 
the effects of the union of the two kingdoms, 
from which this country has derived such 
incalculable benefits in its national wealth and 
domestic industry, without perceiving that in 
time, at least, a corresponding decay may take 
place in its literary and philosophic acquire- 
ments. There are few examples in the history 
of mankind, of an independent kingdom being 
incorporated with another of greater magni- 
tude, without losing, in process of time, the 
national eminence, whether in arts or in arms, 
to which it had formerly arrived. A rare suc- 
cession of great men in our universities, in- 
deed, and an extraordinary combination of 
talents in the works of imagination, has 
hitherto prevented this effect from taking 
place. But who can insure a continuance of 
men of such extraordinary genius, to keep 
alive the torch of science in our northern 
regions ? Is it not to be apprehended that the 
attractions of wealth, of power, and of fashion, 
which have so long drawn our nobles and 
higher classes to the seat of government, may, 
ere long, exercise a similar influence upon our 
national genius, and that the melancholy ca- 
tastrophe which Fletcher of Salton described, 
with all its fatal consequences, may be, even 
now, approaching to its accomplishment? 

Whatever can arrest this lamentable pro- 
gress, and fix down, in a permanent manner, 
the genius of Scotland to its own shores, con- 
fers not only an incalculable benefit upon this 
country, but upon the united empire of which 
it forms a part. The erection of National Mo- 
. in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, 

seems calculated, in a most remarkable man- 
ner, to accomplish this most desirable object. 

To those, indeed, who have not been in the 
habit of attending to the influence of animating 
recollections upon the development of every 
thing that is great or generous in human cha- 
racter, it may appear that the effects we anti- 
cipate from such structures are visionary and 
chimerical. But when a train is ready laid, a 
spark will set it in flames. The Scotch have 
always been a proud and an ardent people; 
and the spirit which animated their forefathers, 
in this respect, is not yet extinct. The Irish 
have genius, which, if properly directed, is 
equal to any thing. England is the centre of 
the intellectual progress of the earth. Upon 
people so disposed, it is difficult to estimate 
the effects which splendid edifices filled with 
monuments to the greatest men whom their 
respective countries can boast, may ultimately 
produce. — It will give stability and consistence 



NATIONAL MONUMENTS. 



75 



to the national pride, a feeling which, when 
properly directed, is the surest foundation of 
national eminence. — It will perpetuate the re- 
membrance of the brave and independent 
Scottish nation — a feeling, of all others, the 
best suited to animate the exertions of her 
remotest descendants. — It will teach her inha- 
bitants to look to their own country for the 
scene of their real glory ; and while Ireland 
laments the absence of a nobility insensible to 
her fame, and unworthy of the land of Burke 
and Goldsmith, it will be the boast of this 
country, to have erected on her own shores a 
monument worthy of her people's glory, and 
to have disdained to follow merely the triumphs 
of that nation, whose ancestors they have ere 
now vanquished in the field. 

Who has not felt the sublime impression 
which the interior of Westminster Abbey pro- 
duces, where the poets, the philosophers, and 
the statesmen of England, " sleep with her 
kings, and dignify the scene 1" Who has 
viewed the church of St. Croce at Florence, and 
seen the tombs of Galileo, and Machiavelli, 
Michael Angelo, and Alfieri, under one sacred 
roof, without feeling their hearts swell with 
the remembrance of her ancient glory; and, 
among the multitudes who will visit the sacred 
pile that is to perpetuate the memory of Scot- 
tish or Irish greatness, how many may there 
be whom so sublime a spectacle may rouse to 
a sense of their native powers, and animate 
with the pride of their country's renown ; and 
in whom the remembrance of the " illustrious 
of ancient days" may awaken the noble feeling 
of Correggio, when he contemplated the works 
of the Roman masters ; " I too am a Painter." 

Nor do we think that such monuments 
could produce effects of less importance upon 
the military character and martial spirit of the 
Scottish people in future ages. The memory 
of the glorious achievements of our age, in- 
deed, will never die, and the page of history 
will perpetuate, to the higher orders, the recol- 
lection of the events which have cast so unri- 
valled a splendour over the British nation, in 
the commencement of the nineteenth century. 
But the study of history has been, hitherto at 
least, confined to few, comparatively speaking, 
of the population of a country ; and the know- 
ledge which it imparts can never extend uni- 
versally to the poorer class, from whom the 
materials of an army are to be drawn. In the 
ruder and earlier periods of society, indeed, 
the traditions of warlike events are preserved 
for a series of years, by the romantic ballads, 
which are cherished by a simple and primitive 
people. The nature of the occupations in 
which they are principally engaged, is favour- 
able to the preservation of such heroic recol- 
lections. But in the state of society in which 
we live, it is impossible that the record of past 
events can be thus engraven on the hearts of a 
nation. The uniformity of employments in 
which the lower orders are engaged — the se- 
vere and unremitting toil to which they are 
exposed — the division of labour which fixes 
them down to one limited and unchanging oc- 
cupation, the prodigious numbers in which 
they are drawn to certain centres of attrac- 
tion far from the recollections of their early 



years, all contribute to destroy those ancient 
traditions, on the preservation of which so 
much of the martial spirit of a people depends. 
The peasantry in the remoter parts of Scotland 
can still recount some of the exploits, and 
dwell with enthusiasm on the adventures of 
Bruce or Wallace; but you will search in 
vain among the English poor for any record 
of the victories of Cressy or Azincour, of 
Blenheim or Ramillies. And even among the 
higher orders, the experience of every day is 
sufficient to convince us that the remembrance 
of ancient glory, though not forgotten, may 
cease to possess any material influence on the 
character of our people. The historian, in- 
deed, may recount the glorious victories of 
Vittoria, Trafalgar, and Waterloo; and their 
names may be familiar to every ear; but the 
name may be remembered when the heart- 
stirring spirit which they should awaken is no 
longer felt. For a time, and during the life- 
time of the persons who were distinguished in 
these events, they form a leading subject of 
the public attention ; but when a new genera- 
tion succeeds, and different cares and fashions 
and events occupy the attention of the nation, 
the practical effects of these triumphs is lost, 
how indelibly soever they may be recorded in 
the pages of history. The victories of Poic- 
tiers, and Blenheim, and Minden had long ago 
demonstrated the superiority of the English 
over the French troops; but though this fact 
appeared unquestionable to those who studied 
the history of past events, everybody knows 
with what serious apprehension a French in- 
vasion was contemplated in this country, 
within our own recollection. 

It is of incalculable importance, therefore, 
that some means should be taken to preserve 
alive the martial spirit which the recent 
triumphs have awakened ; and to do this, in 
so prominent a way as may attract the atten- 
tion of the most thoughtless, and force them 
on the observation of the most inconsiderate. 
It is from men of this description — from the 
young, the gay, and the active, that our armies 
are filled; and it is on the spirit with which 
they are animated that the national safety de- 
pends. Unless they are impressed with the 
recollection of past achievements, and a sense 
of the glories of that country which they are 
to defend, it will little avail us in the moment 
of danger, that the victories on which every 
one now dwells with exultation, are faithfully 
recorded in history, and well known to the 
sedentary and pacific part of our population. 

It is upon the preservation of this spirit that 
the safety of every nation must depend. — It is 
in vain that it may be encircled with fortresses, 
or defended by mountains, or begirt by the 
ocean ; its real security is to be found in the 
spirit and the valour of its people. The army 
which enters the field in the conviction that it 
is to conquer, has already gained the day. The 
people, who recollect with pride the achieve- 
ments of their forefathers, will not prove un- 
worthy of them in the field of battle. The 
remembrance of their heroic actions preserved 
the independence of the Swiss republics, amidst 
the powerful empires by which they were sur- 
rounded; and the glory of her armies, joined 



76 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



to the terror of her name, upheld the Roman 
empire for centuries after the warlike spirit 
of the people was extinct. It is this which 
constitutes the strength and multiplies the 
triumphs of veteran soldiers ; and it is this 
which renders the qualities of military valour 
and prowess hereditary in a nation. 

Every people, accordingly, whose achieve- 
ments are memorable in past history, have 
felt the influence of these national recollec- 
tions, and received them as the most valuable 
inheritance from their forefathers. The states- 
men of Athens, when they wished to rouse that 
fickle people to any great or heroic action, re- 
minded them of the national glory of their 
ancestors, and pointed to the Acropolis crown- 
ed with the monuments of their valour; De- 
mosthenes in the most heart-stirring apostro- 
phe of antiquity invoked the shades of those 
who died at Marathon and Platasa, to sanctify 
the cause in which they were to be engaged. 
The Swiss peasants, for five hundred years 
after the establishment of their independence, 
assembled on the fields of Morgarten and Lau- 
pen, and spread garlands over the graves of 
the fallen warriors, and prayed for the souls 
of those who had died for their country's free- 
dom. The Romans attached a superstitious 
reverence to the rock of the capitol, and loaded 
its temples with the spoils of the world, and 
looked back with a mixture of veneration and 
pride, to the struggles which it had witnessed, 
and the triumphs which it had Avon. 

"Capitoli immobile saxum." 

So long as Manlius remained in sight of the 
capitol, his enemies found it impossible to ob- 
tain a conviction of the charges against him. 
When Scipio Africanus was accused by a fac- 
tion in the forum, in place of answering the 
charge, he turned to the capitol, and invited 
the people to accompany him to the temple of 
Jupiter, and return thanks for the defeat of the 
Carthagenians. Such was the influence of 
local associations on that severe people ; and 
so natural is it for the human mind to imbody 
its recollections in some external object ; and 
so important an effect are these recollections 
fitted to have, when they are perpetually 
brought back to the public mind by the sight of 
the objects to which they have been attached. 

The erection of a national monument, on a 
scale suited to the greatness of the events it is 
intended to commemorate, seems better calcu- 
lated than any other measure to perpetuate the 
spirit which the events of our times have 
awakened in this country. It will force itself 
on the observation of the most thoughtless, 
and recall the recollection of danger and glory, 
during the slumber of peaceful life. Thousands 
who never would otherwise have cast a thought 
upon the glory of their country, will by it be 
awakened to a sense of what befits the de- 
scendants of those great men who have died 
in the cause of national freedom. While it 
will testify the gratitude of the nation to de- 
parted worth, it will serve at the same time to 
mark the distinction which similar victories 
may win. Like the Roman capitol, it will 
stand at once the monument of former great- 
ness, and the pledge of future glory. 



Nor is it to be imagined that the national 
monument in London is sufficient for this pur-- 
pose, and that the commencement of a similar 
undertaking in Edinburgh or Dublin is an un- 
necessary or superfluous proceeding. It is 
quite proper, that in the metropolis of the 
United Empire, the trophies of its common 
triumphs should be found, and that the na- 
tional funds should there be devoted to the 
formation of a monument, worthy of the 
splendid achievements which her united forces 
have performed. But the whole benefits of 
the emulation between the two nations, from 
which our armies have already derived such 
signal advantage, would be lost, if Scotland 
were to participate only in the triumphs of 
her sister kingdom, without distinctly mark- 
ing its own peculiar and national pride, in the 
glory of her own people. The valour of the 
Scottish regiments is known and celebrated 
from one end of Europe to the other; and this 
circumstance, joined to the celebrity of the 
poems of Ossian, has given a distinction to 
our soldiers, to which, for so small a body of 
men, there is no parallel in the history of the 
present age. Would it not be a subject of re- 
proach to this country, if the only land in 
which no record of their gallantry is to be 
found, was the land which gave them birth ; 
and that the traveller who has seen the tartan 
hailed with enthusiasm on every theatre of 
Europe, should find it forgotten only in the 
metropolis of that kingdom which owes its 
salvation to the bravery by which it has been 
distinguished 1 

The animating effects, moreover, which the 
sight of a national trophy is fitted to have on 
a martial people, would be entirely lost in this 
country, if no other monument to Scottish or 
Irish valour existed than the monument in 
London. — There is not a hundredth part of 
our population who have ever an opportunity 
of going to that city; or to whom the existence 
even of such a record of their triumph could 
be known. Even upon those who may see it, 
the peculiar and salutary effect of a national 
monument would be entirely lost. It would 
be regarded as a trophy of English glory; and 
however much it might animate our descend- 
ants to maintain the character of Britain on 
the field of European warfare, it would leave 
wholly untouched those feelings of generous 
emulation by which the rival nations of Eng- 
land and Scotland have hitherto been animated 
towards each other, and to the existence of 
which, so much of their common triumphs 
have been owing. 

It is in the preservation of this feeling of 
rivalry that we anticipate the most important 
effects of a national monument in this me- 
tropolis. There is no danger that the ancient 
animosity of the two nations will ever revive, 
or that the emulation of our armies will lead 
them to prove unfaithful to the common cause 
in which they must hereafter be engaged. The 
stern feelings of feudal haired with which the 
armies of England and Scotland formerly met 
at Flodden or Bannockburn, have now yielded 
to the emulation and friendship which form 
the surest basis of their common prosperity. 
But it is of the last importance that these feel- 



NATIONAL MONUMENTS. 



77 



iags of national rivalry should not be extin- 
guished. In every part of the world the good 
effects of this emulation have been expe- 
rienced. It is recorded, that at the siege of 
Namur, when the German troops were re- 
pulsed from the breach, King William ordered 
his English guards to advance ; and the veteran 
warrior was so much affected with the devoted 
gallantry with which they pressed on to the 
assault, 'that, bursting into tears, he exclaimed, 
"See how my brave English fight." At the 
storm of Bhurtpoor, when one of the British 
regiments was forced back by the dreadtul 
fire that played on the breach, one of the na- 
tive regiments was ordered to advance, and 
these brave men cheered as they passed the 
British troops, who lay trembling in the 
trenches. Everybody knows the distinguished 
gallantry with which the Scottish and Irish re- 
giments, in all the actions of the present war, 
have sought to maintain their ancient reputa- 
tion ; and it is not to be forgotten, that the first 
occasion on which the steady columns of 
France were broken by a charge of cavalry, 
when the leading regiments of England, Scot- 
land, and Ireland, bore down with rival valour 
on their columns ; and in the enthusiastic cry 
of the Grays, "Scotland for ever," we may 
perceive the value of those national recollec- 
tions which it is the object of the present edi- 
fice to reward and perpetuate. 

If this spirit shall live in her armies ; if the 
rival valour which was formerly excited in 
their fatal wars against each other, shall thus 
continue to animate them when fighting against 
their common enemies, and if the remem- 
brance of former division is preserved only to 
cement the bond of present union, Britain and 
Ireland may well, like the Douglas and Percy, 
both together " be confident against the world 
in arms." 

Foreign foe or false beguiling, 
Shall our union ne'er divide, 
Hand in hand, while peace is smiling, 
And in battle side by side. 

There is no fact more certain than that a 
due appreciation of the grand or the beautiful 
in architectural design is not inherent in any 
individual or in any people ; and that towards 
the formation of a correct public taste, the ex- 
istence of fine models is absolutely essential. It 
is this which gives men who have travelled in 
Italy or Greece so evident a superiority in 
considering the merits of the works of art in 
this country over those who have not had 
similar advantages; and it is this which renders 
taste hereditary among a people who have the 
models of ancient excellence continually be- 
fore their eyes. The taste of Athens continued 
to distinguish its people long after they had 
ceased to be remarkable for any other and 
more honourable quality; and Rome itself, in 
the days of its imperial splendour, was com- 
pelled to borrow, from a people whom she had 
vanquished, the trophies by which her victories 
were to be commemorated. To this day the 
lovers of art flock from the most distant parts 
of the world to the Acropolis, and dwell with 
rapture on its unrivalled beauties, and seek to 
inhale, amid the ruins that surround them, a 
portion of (he spirit by which they were con 



ceived. The remains of ancient Home still 
serve as the model of every thing that is great 
in the designs of modern architects ; and in 
the Parthenon and the Coliseum we find the 
originals on which the dome of St. Peter's and 
the piazza St. Marco have been formed. It is 
a matter of general observation, accordingly, 
that the inhabitants of Italy possess a degree 
of taste both in sculpture, architecture, and 
painting, which few persons of the most culti- 
vated understanding in transalpine countries 
can acquire. So true it is, that the existence 
of fine models lays the only foundation ot a 
correct public taste ; and that the transference 
of the model of ancient excellence to this 
country is the only means of giving to our 
people the taste by which similar excellence 
is to be produced. 

Now it has unfortunately happened that the 
Doric architecture, to which so much ot the 
beauty of Greece and Italy is owing, has been 
hitherto little understood, and still less put in 
practice in this country. We meet with lew 
persons who have not visited the remains ot 
classical antiquity, who can conceive the 
matchless beauties of the temples of Minerva 
at Athens, or of Neptune at Prcstum. And, 
indeed, if our conceptions of the Doric betaken 
from the few attempts at imitation of it which 
are here to be met with, they would fall very 
far short, indeed, of what the originals are 
fitted to excite. . 

We are far from underrating the genius ot 
modern architects, and it would be ungrateful 
to insinuate, that sufficient ability for the 
I formation of an original design is not to be 
| found. But in the choice of designs lor a 
building which is to stand for centuries, and 
from which the taste of the metropolis in 
future ages is in a greater measure to be 
formed, it is absolutely essential to fix upon 
some model of known and approved excellence. 
The erection of a monument in bad taste, or 
even of doubtful beauty, might destroy the 
just conceptions on this subject, which are 
beginning to prevail, and throw the national 
taste a century back at the time when it is 
mak-in" the most rapid advances towards per- 
fection! It is in vain to expect that human 
genius can ever make any thing more beauti- 
ful than the Parthenon. It is folly, therefore, 
to tempt fortune, when certainty is in our 

There are many reasons besides, which 
seem in a peculiar manner to recommend the 
Doric temple for the proposed monuments. By 
the habits of modern times, a different species 
of architecture has been devoted to the differ- 
ent purposes to which buildings may be ap- 
plied ; and it is difficult to avoid believing, 
that there is something in the separate styles 
which is peculiarly adapted to the different 
emotions they are intended to excite. 1 he 
light tracery, and lofty roof, and airy pillars 
of the Gothic, seem to accord well with the 
sublime feelings and spiritual fervour ot re- 
ligion. The massy wall, and gloomy character 
of the castle, bespeak the abode of feudal 
power and the pageantry of barbaric magni- 
ficence. The beautiful porticoes, and columns, 
and rich cornices of the Ionic or Corinthian, 
c-2 



78 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



seem well adapted for the public edifices in a 
great city ; for those which are destined for 
arnusement, or to serve for the purpose of 
public ornament. The Palladian style is that 
of all others best adapted for the magnificence 
of private dwellings, and overwhelms the 
spectator by a flood of beauty, against which 
the rules of criticism are unable to withstand. 
If any of these styles of architecture were to 
be transferred from buildings destined for one 
purpose to those destined for another, the im- 
propriety of the change would appear very 
conspicuous. The gorgeous splendour of the 
Palladian front would be entirely misplaced, 
in an edifice destined for the purpose of re- 
ligion ; and the rich pinnacles and gloomy 
aisles of the Gothic, would accord ill with the 
scene of modern amusement or festivity. 

Now a National Monument is an edifice of 
a very singular kind, and such as to require a 
style of architecture peculiar to itself. The 
Grecian Doric, as it is exhibited in the Par- 
thenon, appears singularly well adapted for 
this purpose. Its form and character is asso- 
ciated in every cultivated mind with the re- 
collections of classical history ; and it recalls 
the brilliant conceptions of national glory as 
they were received during the ardent and 
enthusiastic period of youth; while its stern 
and massy form befits an edifice destined to 
commemorate the severe virtues and manly 
character of war. The effect of such a build- 
ing, and the influence it would have on the 
public taste, would be increased to an in- 
definite degree, by the interest of the purpose 
to which it is destined. An edifice which re- 
called at once the interest of classical associa- 
tion, and commemorated the splendour of our 
own achievements, would impress itself in the 
most indelible manner on the public mind, 
and force the beauty of its design on the most 
careless observer. And there can be no doubt 
that this impression would be far greater, just 
because it arose from a style of building 
hitherto unknown in this country, and pro- 
duced an effect as dissimilar from that of any 
other architectural design, as the national 
emotions which it is intended to awaken are 
from those to which ordinary edifices are des- 
tined. 

We cannot help considering this as a matter 
of great importance to this city, and to the 
taste of the age in which we live. It is no 
inconsiderable matter to have one building of 
faultless design erected, and to have the youth 
of our people accustomed from their infancy 
to behold the work of Phidias. But the ulti- 
mate effect which such a circumstance might 
produce on the taste of the nation, and the 
celebrity of this metropolis, is far more im- 
portant. It is in vain to conceal, that the 
wealth and the fashion of England is every 
day attracting the higher part of our society 
to another capital; and that Edinburgh can 
never possess attractions of the same descrip- 
tion with London, sufficient to enable her to 
stand an instant in the struggle. But while 
London must always eclipse this city in all 
that depends on wealth, power, or fashionable 
elegance, nature has given to it the means of 
establishing a superiority of a higher and a 



more permanent kind. The matchless beauty 
of its situation, the superb cliff's by which it 
is surrounded, the magnificent prospects of 
the bay, Avhich it commands, have given to 
Edinburgh the means of becoming the most 
beautiful town that exists in the world. And 
the inexhaustible quarries of free-stone, which 
lie in the immediate vicinity, have rendered 
architectural embellishment an easier object 
in this city than in any other in the empire. 
It cannot be denied, however, that much still 
remains to be done in this respect, and that 
every stranger observes the striking contrast 
between the beauty of its private houses, and 
the deplorable scantiness of its public build- 
ings. The establishment of a taste for edifices 
of an ornamental description, and the gradual 
purification of the popular taste, which may 
fairly be expected from the influence of so 
perfect a model as the Parthenon of Athens, 
would ultimately, in all probability, render 
this city the favourite residence of the fine 
arts; the spot to which strangers would, re- 
sort, both as the place where the rules of taste 
are to be studied, and the models of art are to 
be found. And thus, while London is the 
Rome of the empire, to which the young, and 
the ambitious, and the gay, resort for the pur- 
suit of pleasure, of fortune, or of ambition, 
Edinburgh might become another Athens, in 
which the arts and the sciences flourished, 
under the shade of her ancient fame, and 
established a dominion over the minds of men 
more permanent than even that which the 
Roman arms were able to effect. 

The Greeks always fixed on an eminence 
for the situation of their temples, and what- 
ever was the practice of a people of such ex- 
quisite taste is well worthy of imitation. The 
Acropolis of Athens, the Acrocorinthus of 
Corinth, the temple of Jupiter Panhellenius, 
in ^Egina, are instances of the beauty of these 
edifices when placed on such conspicuous 
situations. At Athens, in particular, the tem- 
ples of Jupiter Olympius and of Theseus are 
situated in the plain; but although the former 
is built in a style of magnificence to which 
there is no parallel, and is double the size of 
the Parthenon, its effect is infinitely less strik- 
ing than that of the temple of Minerva, which 
crowns the Acropolis, and meets the eye from 
every part of the adjacent country. The tem- 
ple of Jupiter Panhellenius, in the island of 
iEgina, is neither so large nor so beautiful as 
the temple of Theseus; but there is no one 
who ever thought of comparing the effect 
which the former produces, crowning a rich 
and wooded hill, to that which is felt on view- 
ing the latter standing in the plain of Attica. 
The temple of Neptune, at Poestum, has a 
sublime effect from the desolation that sur- 
rounds it, and from the circumstance of there 
being no eminence for many miles to interfere 
with its stern and venerable form ; but there 
is no one who must not have felt that the 
grandeur of this edifice would be entirely lost 
if it was placed in a modern city, and over- 
topped by buildings destined for the most or- 
dinary purposes. The temple of Vesta, at 
Tivoli, perched on the crag which overhangs 
the cataract, is admired by all the world; but 



NATIONAL MONUMENTS. 



79 



the temple to the same goddess, on the hanks 
of the Tiber, at Rome, is passed over without 
notice, though the intrinsic beauty of the one 
is nearly as great as that of the other. In the 
landscapes too of Claude and Poussin, who 
knew so well the situation in which every 
building appears to most advantage, the ruins 
of temples are almost always placed on pro- 
minent fronts, or on the summit of small 
hills ; in such a situation, in short, as the Cal- 
ton Hill of Edinburgh presents. The practice 
of the ancient Greeks, in the choice of situa- 
tions for their temples, joined to that of the 
modern Italian painters in their ideal repre- 
sentations of the same objects, leaving no 
room to doubt that the course which they fol- 
lowed was that which the peculiar nature of 
the building required. 

But all objects of local interest sink into 
insignificance compared with the vast effect 
which a restoration of so perfect a relic of 
antiquity as the Parthenon of Athens would 
have on the national taste, and ultimately on 
the - spread of refined and elevating feelings 
among the inhabitants of the country. As 
this is a subject of the very highest import- 
ance, and which is not generally so well 
understood as it should be, we crave the in- 
dulgence of our readers to a few observations, 
conceived in the warmest feeling of interest 
in modern art, but a strong sense of the only 
means by which it can be brought to the ex- 
cellence of which it is susceptible. 

It is observed by Madame de Stael, " that 
architecture is the only art which approaches, 
in its effects, to the works of nature," and 
there are few, we believe, who have not, at 
some period of their lives, felt the truth of the 
observation. The Cathedral of York, the 
Dome of St. Paul's, or the interior of St. 
Peter's, are scarcely eclipsed in our recollec- 
tion with the glories of human creation; and 
the impression which they produce is less 
akin to admiration of the talent of an artist, 
than to the awe and veneration which the tra- 
veller feels when he first enters the defiles of 
the Alps. 

It has often been a matter of regret to per- 
sons of taste in this country, that an art so 
magnificent in its monuments, and so power- 
ful in its effect, has been so little the object 
of popular cultivation ; nor is it perhaps 
easy to understand, how a people so much 
alive to the grand and beautiful in the other 
departments of taste, should so long have re- 
mained insensible to the attractions of one of 
its most interesting branches. Many causes 
have, doubtless, conspired to produce this 
effect; but among these, the principal, we are 
persuaded, is to be found in the absence of 
any monuments of approved excellence to form the 
taste, and excite the admiration of the public. 
And, in this respect, there is an important dis- 
tinction, which is often overlooked, between 
architecture and the other departments of art 
or literature. 

In poetry, painting, or sculpture, the great 
works of former times are in everybody's 
hands ; and the public taste has long ago been 
formed on the study of those remains of an- 
cient genius, which still continue, notwith- 



standing the destruction of the people who 
gave them birth, to govern the imagination of 
succeeding ages. The poetry of Virgil, and 
the eloquence of Cicero, form the first objects 
to which the education of the young is di- 
rected ; the designs of Raphael and Correggio 
have been multiplied by the art of engraving, 
to almost as great an extent as the classical 
authors ; and casts, at least, of the Apollo and 
the Venus, are familiar to every person who 
has paid the smallest attention to the beauty 
of the human form. It is on the habitual 
study of these works that the public taste has 
been formed ; and the facility of engraving 
and painting has extended our acquaintance 
with their excellencies, almost as far as 
knowledge or education have extended in the 
world. 

But with architecture the case is widely 
different. Public edifices cannot be published 
and circulated with the same facility as an 
edition of Virgil, or a print of Claude Lorraine. 
To copy or restore such monuments, requires 
an expenditure of capital, and an exertion of 
skill, almost as great as their original con- 
struction. Nations must be far advanced in 
wealth and attainment before such costly un- 
dertakings can be attempted. And if the su- 
perstition of an earlier age has produced 
structures of astonishing magnitude and ge- 
nius, they are of a kind which, however 
venerable or imposing, are not calculated to 
have the same effect in chastening the public 
taste, with those that arose in that auspicious 
period when all the finer powers of the mind 
had attained their highest exaltation. It thus 
unfortunately happens, that architecture can- 
not share in the progress which the other fine 
arts are continually making from the circula- 
tion and study of the works of antiquity; and 
successive nations are often obliged to begin 
anew the career which their predecessors 
have run, and fall inevitably into the errors 
which they had learned to avoid. 

The possibility of multiplying drawings or 
engravings of the edifices of antiquity, or of 
informing distant nations of their proportions 
and dimensions, has but little tendency to 
obviate this disadvantage. Experience has 
shown that the best drawings convey a most 
inadequate conception of architectural gran- 
deur, or of the means by which it is produced. 
To those, indeed, who have seen the originals, 
such engravings are highly valuable, because 
they awaken and renew the impression which 
the edifices themselves have made; but to 
those who have not had this advantage, they 
speak an unknown language. This is matter 
of common observation; and there is no tra- 
veller who has returned from Greece or Italy, 
who will not confirm its truth. It is as im- 
possible to convey a conception of the exterior 
of the Parthenon, or the interior of St. Peter's, 
by the finest drawings accompanied by the 
most accurate statement of their dimensions, 
as to give the inhabitants of a level country 
a true sense of the sublimity of the Alps, by 
exhibiting a drawing of the snowy peaks of 
Mont Blanc, and informing him of its altitude 
according to the latest trigonometrical obser 
vations. 



80 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Even if drawings could convey a concep- 
tion of the original structures, the taste for 
this art is so extremely limited that it could 
have but little effect in obviating the disadvan- 
tage of their remote situation. There is not 
one person in a hundred who ever looks at a 
drawing, or, if he does, is capable of deriving 
the smallest pleasure from the finest produc- 
tions of that branch of art. To be reduced to 
turn over a portfolio of engravings, is prover- 
bially spoken of as the most wretched of all 
occupations in a drawing-room ; and it is no 
uncommon thing to see the productions of 
Claude, or Poussin, or Williams, abounding 
in all the riches of architectural ornament, 
passed over without the slightest indication of 
emotion, by persons of acknowledged taste in 
other respects. And yet the same individuals, 
who are utterly insensible to architectural ex- 
oellence in this form, could not avoid acquiring 
a certain taste for its beauties, if they were 
the subject of habitual observation, in edifices 
at home, or obtruded upon their attention in 
the course of foreign travelling. 

Besides this, the architect is exposed to in- 
surmountable difficulties, if the cultivation of 
those around him has not kept pace with his 
own, and if they are incapable of feeling the 
beauty of the edifices on which his taste has 
been formed. It is to no purpose that his own 
taste may have been improved by studying the 
ruins of Athens or Rome, unless the taste of 
his employ cm has undergone a similar ameliora- 
tion, his genius will remain dormant, and his 
architectural drawings be suffered to lie in 
unnoticed obscurity in the recesses of his 
portfolio. The architect, it should always be 
remembered, cannot erect edifices, as the poet 
writes verses, or the painter covers his can- 
vas, without any external assistance. A great 
expenditure of capital is absolutely essential 
to the production of any considerable specimen 
of his art: and, therefore, unless he can com- 
municate his own enthusiasm to the wealth}-, 
and unless a growing desire for architectural 
embellishments is sufficient to overcome the 
inherent principle of parsimony, or the inte- 
rested views of individuals, or the jealousy of 
public bodies, he will never have an opportu- 
nity of displaying his genius, or all his at- 
tempts will be thwarted by persons incapable 
of appreciating it. And unfortunately the 
talents of no artist, how great soever, can 
effect such a revolution ; it can be brought 
about only by the continued observation of beauti- 
ful edifices, and the diffusion of a taste for the 
art among all the well-educated classes of the 
people. 

The states of antiquity lay so immediately 
in the vicinity of each other, that the progress 
of architecture was uninterrupted; and thus 
people of each nation formed their taste by the 
study of the structures of those to whom they 
lay adjacent. The Athenians, in particular, in 
raising the beautiful edifices which have so 
long been the admiration of the world, pro- 
ceeded entirely upon the model of the build- 
ings by which they were surrounded, and the 
'temple of Jupiter Panhellenius, in the island 
of -•Egina, which is said to have been built by 
^Eacus before the Trojan War, remains to this 



day to testify the species of edifices on which 
their national taste was formed. The Ionic 
order, as its name denotes, arose in the wealthy 
regions of Asia Minor; and when the Athe- 
nians turned their attention to the embellish- 
ment of their city, they had, in their immediate 
vicinity, edifices capable of pointing out the 
excellencies of that beautiful style. The Ro- 
mans formed their taste upon the architecture 
of the people whom they had subdued, and 
adopted all their orders from the Grecian 
structures. Their early temples were exactly 
similar to those of their masters in the art of 
deaigh; and when the national taste was 
formed upon that model, they combined them, 
as real genius will, into different forms, and 
left the Coliseum and the baths of Dioclesian 
as monuments of the grandeur and originality 
of their conceptions. 

In modern times, the restoration of taste first 
began around the edifices of antiquity. " On 
the revival of the art in Italy," says Lord Aber- 
deen, '• during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
turies, the great architects who adorned that 
country naturally looked for instruction to the 
monuments with which they were surrounded: 
the wrecks and fragments of Imperial Rome. 
These were not only successfully imitated, but 
sometimes even surpassed by the Italian art- 
ists; for Bramante and Michael Angelo, Pal- 
ladio and Bernini, designed and executed 
works which, although of unequal merit, may 
fairly challenge a comparison with the boasted 
productions of the Augustan age." Italy and 
France, accordingly, have reaped the full ad- 
vantage of their local proximity to the monu- 
ments of former genius; and the character of 
their buildings evinces a decided superiority 
to the works of architects in other states. 

In the south of Europe, therefore, the pro- 
gress of architecture has been uninterrupted, 
and each successive age has reaped the full 
benefit which the works of those which pre- 
ceded it was fitted to confer. But the remote- 
ness of their situation has deprived the in- 
habitants of the north of Europe of this advan- 
tage ; and, while the revival of letters and the 
arts has developed the taste of the people of 
this country in other respects, to a very great 
degree, their knowledge of architecture is yet 
in its infancy. In this city the most remarka- 
ble proofs of this deficiency were annually 
exhibited till a very recent period. The same 
age which was illustrated by the genius of 
Sir Walter Scott, and Campbell, and Dugald 
Stewart, witnessed the erection of Nelson's 
monument and St. George's church. 

The extraordinary improvement in the public 
taste, which has taken place since the peace 
of 1814, opened the Continent to so large a pro- 
portion of our population, evinces, in the most 
unequivocal manner, the influence of the actual 
sight of fine models in training the mind to the 
perception of architectural beauty. That archi- 
tecture is greatly more an object both of study 
and interest than it was ten years ago, is 
matter of common observation ; and the most 
convincing proof of the extension of a taste 
for its excellencies is to be found in the rapid 
increase and extensive circulation of en- 
gravings of the most interesting ruins on the 



NATIONAL MONUMENTS. 



81 



Continent, which has taken place of late years. 
These engravings, however incapable of con- 
veying an adequate idea of the originals, to 
those who have never left this country, yet 
serve as an admirable auxiliary to the memo- 
ry, in retaining the impression which they 
had produced on those who have had that 
advantage; and, accordingly, their sale is 
almost entirely confined to persons of that de- 
scription. 

Nor is the improvement less gratifying in 
the style of the edifices, and the genius of the 
architects who have arisen during that period. 
The churches of Marybone and St. Pancras, in 
London, notwithstanding some striking defects, 
are by far the finest buildings which have been 
raised in the metropolis since the days of Sir 
Christopher Wren. The new street in front 
of Carlton House, including the Quadrant, 
contains some most beautiful specimens of 
architecture; although the absurd rage for 
novelty has disfigured it by other structures 
of extraordinary deformity. The buildings 
which adjoin, and look into the Regent Park, 
are the most chaste and elegant examples of 
the application of the Grecian architecture to 
private edifices which the metropolis can boast. 
Nor is the improvement less conspicuous in 
our own capital, where the vicinity of free- 
stone quarries of uncommon beauty, and the 
advantages of unrivalled situation, have ex- 
cited a very strong desire for architectural 
embellishment. It is hardly possible to believe 
that Waterloo Place, the Royal Terrace, Leo- 
pold Place, and the Melville Monument, have 
been erected in the same age which witnessed 
the building of Lord Nelson's monument on 
the Calton Hill, or the recent edifices in the 
Parliament Square. The remarkable start 
which the genius as well as the taste of our 
architects has taken since the public attention 
was drawn to this art, affords a striking proof 
of the influence of popular encouragement in 
fostering the conceptions of native genius, and 
illustrates the hopelessness of expecting that 
our artists will ever attain to excellence, when 
the taste of the people does not keep pace with 
their exertions. 

But the causes which have recently given 
so remarkable a stimulus to architectural ex- 
ertion are temporary in their nature. It is 
impossible to expect that the Continent will 
always be open to our youth, or that the public 
attention can be permanently directed to the 
arts of peace, with the interest which is so 
remarkable at this time. Other wars may 
arise which will shut us out from the south 
of Europe; the interest of politics may again 
withdraw the national attention from the fine 
arts; or the war of extermination, of which 
Greece is now the theatre, may utterly destroy 
those monuments which have so long survived 
to direct and improve the world. From the 
present aspect of affairs on the Continent, 
there seems every reason to apprehend that 
one or both of these effects may very soon 
take place. These circumstances render it 
the more desirable, that some steps should be 
taken lo fix in this island the fleeting percep- 
tion of architectural beauty which is now 
prevalent; and, if possible, render our people 
11 



independent of foreign travelling, or of the 
borrowed aid of foreign edifices. 

Lord Aberdeen, like all other travellers of* 
taste, speaks in the highest terms of the im- 
pression produced by the unrivalled edifices 
of ancient Greece; and contrasts the pure and 
faultless taste by which they are distinguished, 
with the ephemeral productions which in 
modern times have arisen, in the vain attempt 
to improve upon their proportions. If we seek 
for the manifestation of pure taste in the 
monuments which surround us, our search 
will but too often prove fruitless. We must 
turn our eyes towards those regions, 

Where on the Egean shore a city stands, 

Built nobly! 

Here, — it has been little understood, for it has 
been rarely felt; its country is Greece, — its 
throne the Acropolis of Athens. 

"By a person writing on the subject of 
architecture, the name of Athens can scarcely 
be pronounced without emotion, and, in the 
mind of one who has had the good fortune to 
examine at leisure its glorious remains, im- 
pressions are revived which time and distance 
can never obliterate. It is difficult to resist the 
desire of fondly dwelling on the descriptions 
of monuments, to the beauty of which, although 
they have been long well known, and accu- 
rately described, we feel that no language can 
do full justice. But, as it is not the purpose 
of this inquiry to give those practical or de- 
tailed instructions in the art, which may be so 
much better attained from other sources, I will 
only observe in this place, what it is of con- 
sequence to keep in view, because no descrip- 
tions or representations, however accurate, 
can give adequate notions of the effect of the 
originals, that, notwithstanding the lapse of 
ages, the injuries of barbarism, and fanatical 
violence, Athens still presents to the student 
the most faultless models of ornamental archi- 
tecture; and is still, therefore, the best school 
for the acquisition of the highest attributes of 
his art."— pp. 35, 36. 

Speaking of the numerous attempts at no- 
velty, which have been made in modern times, 
he observes : 

" It may be observed in general, that few of 
those numerous changes of taste which an in- 
satiable desire of novelty, or the caprice of 
fashion, may have sanctioned for a time, have 
been ultimately successful ; for these ephe- 
meral productions, however warmly sup- 
ported, have been found successively to vanish 
before the steady and permanent attractions of 
Grecian beauty, and we shall probably feel dis- 
posed to admit, that the ornamental details of 
the standard models of antiquity, combined 
and modified by discretion and judgment, ap- 
pear to offer a sufficient variety for the exer- 
cise of invention and genius in this province 
of the art."— p. 30. 

And comparing these with the remains of 
Grecian architecture, he observes: 

" The precious remains of Grecian art were 
long neglected, and the most beautiful were, in 
truth, nearly inaccessible to the Christian 
world. It is almost in our own time, that ob- 
stacles, formerly insurmountable, have been 
since vanquished; and that the treasures of 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



art, still unfortunately in the custody of igno- 
rance and barbarism, have not only been 
visited, but have been accurately measured 
and delineated. Henceforth, therefore, these 
exquisite remains should form the chief study 
of the architect who aspires to permanent 
reputation; other modes are transitory and 
uncertain, but the essential qualities of Gre- 
cian excellence, as they are founded on reason, 
and are consistent with fitness and propriety, 
will ever continue to deserve his first care." — 
pp. 215, 216. 

The argument which is most commonly 
urged against the restoration of an ancient 
structure, is, that it is degrading to copy the 
architecture of another people. It is both hu- 
miliating to our artists, it is said, and inju- 
rious to the progress of art, to imitate what 
has been already done. The Romans never 
copied; but, borrowing merely the general 
forms of the Grecian architecture, moulded 
them into different combinations, which gave 
a different character to their style of building. 
Such also should be the course which we 
should adopt. 

This very plausible argument proceeds 
upon an inattention to the successive steps 
by which excellence in the fine arts is attained, 
and a mistaken conception of the height to 
which we have already ascended in our taste 
or knowledge of architecture. It is quite true 
that the Romans did not copy the Grecian tem- 
ples ; and that the modern Italians have not 
thought of attempting a restoration of the Coli- 
seum or the Pantheon. But it is to be recol- 
lected that the originals were within their reach, 
and had already exercised their salutary influence 
upon the public taste. The ancient Romans 
had only to go to Psestum, Agrigentum, or 
Syracuse, to behold the finest Grecian temples ; 
and their warlike youth, in the course of the 
military expeditions to which all the citizens 
were liable, had perpetually, in their eastern 
dominions, the Grecian edifices placed before 
their eyes. Michael Angelo, Poussin, and 
"Claude Lorraine, lived amidst the ruins of an- 
cient Rome, and formed their taste from their 
earliest youth, upon the habitual contemplation 
of those monuments. For them to have co- 
pied these buildings, with a view to the re- 
storation of the public taste, would have been as 
absurd as for us to copy York or Lincoln Ca- 
thedrals, in order to revive an admiration for 
the Gothic architecture. 

But is there no difference between the situ- 
ation of a people, who, like the ancient Romans 
and modern Italians, had the great models of 
antiquity continually before their eyes, and 
that of a people, who, like the inhabitants of 
this island, have no models in the Doric style, 
either to form their taste, or guide their exer- 
tions, and who have no means of reaching the 
remains of that order which exist, but by a 
journey of many thousand miles'! Of the in- 
fluence of the study of ancient excellence in 
improving the taste, both of architects and peo- 
ple, no one acquainted with the subject can 
have the smallest doubt; and it is stated in 
the strongest terms, by the author whose obser- 
vations have just been mentioned. "Amidst 
the ruins of Rome, the great Italian architects 



formed their taste. They studied the relics of 
ancient grandeur, with all the diligence of en- 
thusiasm. They measured the proportions, and 
drew the details, and modelled the members 
But when their artists were employed by the 
piety or magnificence of the age, they never re 
stored the examples by which they were sur- 
rounded, and which were the objects of theii 
habitual study. The architects did not linger in 
contemplation of their predecessors; former 
generations had advanced and they proceeded." 

Now such being the influence of the remains 
of antiquity in guiding the inventions, and 
chastening the taste of modern artists, is there 
no advantage in putting our architects in this 
particular on a level with those of Italy, and com- 
pensating, in some degree, b)' the restoration 
of the finest monuments of ancient genius, 
the local disadvantages with which a residence 
in this remote part of the world is necessarily at- 
tended ? By doing this, we are not precluding 
the development of modern invention ; we are, 
on the contrary, laying the surest foundation 
♦for it, by bringing our artists to the point from 
which the Italian artists took their departure. 
When this is done, the inventive genius of the 
two nations will be able to commence their 
career with equal advantages. Till it is attempt- 
ed, we can hardly hope that we shall overtake 
them in the race. Suppose, that instead of 
possessing the Coliseum and the Pantheon 
within their walls, and having made their pro- 
portions the continual subject of their study, 
the Roman artists had been obliged to travel 
into the interior of Asia to visit their ruins, 
and that this journey, from the expense with 
which it was attended, had been within the 
reach only of a few of the most opulent and 
adventurous of their nobility ; can there be the 
slightest doubt that the fine arts in that city 
would have been greatly indebted to any Ro- 
man pontiff who restored those beautiful mo- 
numents in his own dominions] and yet this 
benefit is seriously made a matter of doubt, 
when the restoration of the Parthenon is pro- 
posed, in a part of the world where the remains 
of ancient genius are placed at the distance of 
two thousand miles. 

The greatest exertions of original genius, 
both in literature and arts, by which modern 
Europe has been distinguished, have been made 
in an age when the wealth of ancient times 
was thoroughly understood. The age of Tasso 
andMachiavel/bZ/oiw/ the restoration of letters 
in Italy. If we compare their writings with those 
which preceded, that great event, the difference 
appears almost incalculable. It was on the stu- 
dy of Grecian and Roman eloquence, that Mil- 
ton trained himself to those sublime concep- 
tions which have immortalized his name. 
Raphael and Michael Angelo gave but slight 
indications of original genius till their pow- 
ers were awakened and their taste refined by 
the study of the Grecian sculpture. Statuary, in 
modern times, has nowhere been cultivated with 
such success as at Rome, amidst the works 
of former ages; and Chantry has declared that 
the arrival of the Elgin marbles in the British 
Museum is to be regarded as an era in the pro- 
gress of art in this country. Architecture has 
attained its greatest perfection in France and 



NATIONAL MONUMENTS. 



83 



Italy, where the study of the remains of anti- 
quity which those countries contain, has had 
so powerful an influence upon the public taste. 
Those who doubt the influence of the restoration 
of the Parthenon, in improving the efforts of 
original genius in this country, reason in op- 
position not only to the experience of past 
times, in all the other departments of literature 
and art, but to all that we know of the causes 
to which the improvement of architecture itself 
has been owing. 

It is no answer to this to say that drawings 
and prints of these edifices are open to all the 
world; and that an architect may study the 
proportions of the Parthenon as well in 
Stuart's Athens, as on the Calton Hill of Edin- 
burgh. An acquaintance with drawings is 
limited to a small number, even in the most 
polished classes of society, and to the middling 
and lower orders is almost unknown ; where- 
as, public edifices are seen by all the world, 
and obtrude themselves on the attention of the 
most inconsiderate. There are few persons 
who return from Greece or Italy, without a 
considerable taste for architectural beauty ; 
but during the war, when travelling was im- 
possible, the existence of Stuart's Athens and 
Piranesi's Rome produced no such effect. 
Our architects, during the war, had these ad- 
mirable engravings constantly at their com- 
mand: but how wretched were their concep- 
tions before the peace had afforded them the 
means of studying the originals ! The extra- 
ordinary improvement which both the style of 
our buildings, and the taste of our people have 
received, since the edifices of France and Italy 
were laid open to so large a proportion of the 
country, demonstrates the superior efficacy of 
actual observation, to the study of prints, in 
improving the public taste for architectural 
beauty. The engravings never become an object 
of interest till the originals have been seen. 

The recent attempts to introduce a new 
order of architecture in this island, demon- 
strate, that we have not as yet arrived at the 
point where the study of ancient models can 
be dispensed with. In the new street in front 
of Carlton House, every thing, which, if form- 
ed on the model of the antique, is beautiful; 
every thing in which novelty has been at- 
tended is a deformity. It is evident, that more 
than one generation must pass away, before 
architecture is so thoroughly understood as to 
admit of the former landmarks being disre- 
garded. 

The belief that a Grecian temple cannot 
look beautiful, but in the climate and under 
the sun of Athens, is a total mistake. The 
clear atmosphere which prevails during the 
frosts of winter, or in the autumnal months, 
in Scotland, is as favourable to the display of 
architectural splendour, as the warm atmo- 
sphere of Greece. The Melville monument in 
St. Andrew's Square appears nowise inferior 
to the original in the Roman capitol. The 
gray and time-worn temples of Paestum are 
perhaps more sublime that the Grecian struc- 
tures which still retain the brightness and 
lustre by which they were originally charac- 
terized. Of all the edifices which the genius 
of man ever conceived, the Doric temple is 



most independent of the adventitious advantages 
of light and shade, and rests most securely on 
the intrinsic grandeur and solidity of its con- 
struction. 

To say, that every people have an archi- 
tecture of their own, and that the Gothic is 
irretrievably fixed down upon this island, is a 
position unwarranted either by reason or 
authority. A nation is not bound to adhere to 
barbarous manners, because their ancestors 
were barbarous; nor is the character of their 
literature to be fixed by the productions of its 
earliest writers. It is by its works in the 
period of its meridian splendour, that the opi- 
nion of posterity is formed. The bow was 
once the national weapon of England, and to 
the skill with which it was used, our greatest 
victories have been owing; but that is no 
reason why it should be adhered to as the 
means of national defence after fire-arms have 
been introduced. If we must make something 
peculiar in the National Monument, let it be 
the peculiarity which distinguishes the period 
when architecture and the other fine arts 
have attained to their highest perfection, and 
not the period of their infancy. But the feudal 
and castellated forms arose during an age of 
ignorance and civil dissension. To compel 
us to continue that style as the national archi- 
tecture, would be as absurd as to consider 
Chaucer as the standard of English literature, 
or Duns Scotus as the perfection of Scotch 
eloquence. We do not consider the writers in 
the time of the Jameses as the model of our 
national literature. Why then should we con- 
fer that distinction on the architecture which 
arose out of the circumstances of the barba- 
rous period'? 

For these reasons, we are compelled to dif- 
fer from the noble author, whose very inte- 
resting essay on Grecian architecture has 
done so much to awaken the world to a sense 
of its excellencies, in regard to the expediency 
of restoring the Parthenon in the National 
Monument of Scotland. From the taste which 
his work exhibits, and from the obvious supe- 
riority which he possesses over ourselves in 
estimating the beauties of Grecian architec- 
ture, we drew the strongest argument in favour 
of such a measure. It was from a study of 
the ruins of ancient Greece, that Lord Aber- 
deen acquired the information and taste which 
he possesses on this subject, and gained the 
superiority which he enjoys over his untra- 
velled countrymen. If they had the same 
means of visiting and studying the originals 
which he has possessed, we should agree 
with him in thinking, that the genius of the 
age should be directed to new combinations. 
But when this is not the case, we must be con- 
tent to proceed by slower degrees; and while 
nineteen-twentieths of our people do not know 
what the Parthenon is, and can perceive no- 
thing remarkable in the finest models of archi- 
tectural excellence, we must not think of 
forming new orders. It is enough if we can 
make them acquainted with those which 
already exist. The first step towards national 
excellence in the fine arts, is to feel the beauty 
of that which has already been done ; the se- 
cond, is to excel it. We must take the first 



84 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



laid'thf? I ,7 thC S f C ° nd - • HaVing I left - But m this is done, there is every rea- 

aid the foundation of national taste in archi- son to apprehend, that the efforts of ZrlrlSt* 

tec lure, by restoring the finest model of anti- will be as ineffectual in obtaining true beaut? 

qmty on the situation of all others the best as the genius of our writerTw^ iJ f «h? 7 ' 

adapted for making Us excellencies known, we real ex'cellenYe un 7 h reXatVn^Tthl 

shall be prepared to form new edifices, and classic authors gave talent its true direction 
po SS1 bly to surpass those which antiquity has | and public taste an unexceptionaWe stndard 



MARSHAL NEY.* 



The memoirs connected with the French 
Revolution furnish an inexhaustible source 
of interesting discussion. We shall look in 
vain in any other period of history for the 
same splendid succession of events; for a 
phantasmagoria in which characters so illus- 
trious are passed before the view; or for in- 
dividuals whose passions or ambition have 
exercised an equally important influence on 
human affairs. When we enter upon the era 
of Napoleon, biography assumes the dignity 
of history ; the virtues and vices of individuals 
become inseparably blended with public mea- 
sures ; and in the memoirs of contemporary 
writers, we turn for the secret springs of those 
great events which have determined the fate 
of nations. 

From the extraordinary interest, however, 
connected with this species of composition, 
has arisen an evil of no ordinary kind. Not 
France only, but Europe at large, being in- 
satiable for works of this kind, an immense 
number have sprung up of spurious origin, or 
doubtful authority. Writing of memoirs has 
become a separate profession. A crowd of 
able young men devote themselves to this fas- 
cinating species of composition, which pos- 
sesses the interest of history without its dry- 
ness, and culls from the book of Time only 
the most brilliant of its flowers. Booksellers 
engage in the wholesale manufacture, as a 
mercantile speculation; an attractive name, 
an interesting theme, is selected; the relations 
of the individuals whose memoirs are pro- 
fessed to be given to the world, are besought 
to furnish a few original documents or au- 
thentic anecdotes, to give an air of veracity to 
the composition ; and at length the memoirs 
are ushered forth to the world as the work of 
one who never wrote one syllable of them 
himself. Of this description are the soi-disant 
Memoirs of Fouche, Robespierre, Une Femme 
de Quahte, Louis the Eighteenth, and many 
others, which are now admitted to be the work 
of the manufacturers for the Parisian book- 
sellers, but are nevertheless interspersed with 
many authentic and interesting anecdotes 
derived from genuine sources, and contain in 
consequence much valuable matter for future 
history. 

In considering the credit due to any set of 
memoirs, one main point, of course, is, whe- 
ther they are published by a living author of 



* Memoires du Mareohal Ney. publics par sa Famille 



character and station in society. If they are, 
there is at least the safeguard against impos- 
ture, which arises from the facility with which 
they may be disavowed, and the certainty that 
no man of character would permit a spurious 
composition to be palmed upon the world as 
his writing. The Memoirs, therefore, of Bour- 
rienne, Madame Junot, Savary, and many 
others, may be relied on as at least the ad- 
mitted work of the persons whose names they 
bear, and as ushered into the world under the 
sanction and on the responsibility of livin°- 
persons of rank or station in society. 

There are other memoirs, again, of such ex- 
traordinary ability as at once to bear the stamp 
of originality and veracity on their very face. 
Of this description are Napoleon's memoirs, 
dictated to Montholon and Gourgaud ; a work 
which bears in every page decisive marks of 
the clear conceptions, lucid ideas, and tranch- 
ant sagacity of the Conqueror of Austerlitz 
and Rivoli. Judging from internal evidence, 
we are disposed to rank these invaluable Me- 
moirs much higher than the rambling and dis- 
cursive, though interesting work of Las Casas. 
They are not nearly so impassioned or ran- 
corous ; facts are not so obviously distorted; 
party spirit is not so painfully conspicuous! 
With regret, we must add, that even these 
genuine memoirs, dictated by Napoleon him- 
self, as the groundwork for the history of his 
achievements, contain the marks of the weak- 
nesses as well as the greatness of his mind ; 
an incessant jealousy of every rival who ap- 
proached even to his glory; an insatiable 
passion for magnifying his own exploits; a 
disregard of truth so remarkable in a person 
gifted with such extraordinary natural sagaci- 
ty, that it can be ascribed only to the poison- 
ous moral atmosphere which a revolution pro- 
duces. The Memoirs of Thibaudeau perhaps 
exhibit the most valuable and correct, as well 
as favourable picture of the emperor's min-i. 
In the discussions on the great public mea- 
sures which were submitted to the Council of 
State at Paris, and, above all, in the clear and 
luminous speeches of Napoleon on every sub- 
ject, whether of civil or military administra- 
tion, that occurred during his consulship, is 
to be found the clearest proof of the vast grasp 
and great capacity of his mind; and in their 
superiority to those of the other speakers, and; 
above all, of Thibaudeau himself, the best 
evidence of the fidelity of his reports. 

Next in value to those of Napoleon and 
Thibaudeau, we are inclined to place those of 



MARSHAL NEY. 



85 



Bourrienne and the Duchess of Ahrantes. The 
first of these writers, in addition to consider- 
able natural talents, enjoyed the inestimable ad- 
vantage of having been the school-fellow of 
Napoleon, and his private secretary during 
the most interesting period of his life; that 
which elapsed from the opening of has Italian 
Campaign, in 1796, to his accession to the 
throne in 1804. If Bourrienne could be entire- 
ly relied on, his Memoirs, with such sources 
of information, would be invaluable; but un- 
fortunately, it is evident that he labours under 
a feeling of irritation at his former school- 
fellow, which renders it necessary to take his 
statements with some grains of allowance. 
Few men can forgive the extraordinary and 
unlooked-for elevation of their former equals ; 
and, in addition to this common source of pre- 
judice, it is evident that Bourrienne labours 
under another and a less excusable feeling. 
It is plain, even from his own admission, that 
he had been engaged in some money transac- 
tions of a doubtful character with M. Ouvrard, 
which rendered his continuing in the highly 
confidential situation of private secretary to 
the emperor improper ; and his dismissal from 
it has evidently tinged his whole narrative 
with a certain feeling of acrimony, which, if 
it has not made him actually distort facts, has 
at least caused them to appear in his hands 
through a medium coloured to a certain de- 
gree. 

The Duchess of Ahrantes, like most of the 
other annalists of Napoleon, labours under 
prepossessions of a different kind. She was 
intimate with Napoleon from his childhood ; 
her mother had the future emperor on her 
knee from the day of his birth ; and the in- 
timacy between the two families continued so 
great, that when Napoleon arrived at the age 
of twenty-six, and felt, as he expresses it, the 
" besoin de se fixer," he actually proposed for 
the duchess's mother himself, who was a per- 
son of great natural attractions, while he 
wished at the same time to arrange a mar- 
riage between Joseph and the duchess, and 
Pauline and her brother. It may readily be 
imagined that, though these proposals were 
all declined, they left no unfavourable impres- 
sion on the duchess's mind; and this, coupled 
with her subsequent marriage to Junot, and 
his rapid advancement by the emperor, has 
filled her mind with an admiration of his cha- 
racter almost approaching to idolatry. She 
sees every thing, in consequence, in the con- 
sular and imperial government, in the most 
favourable colours. Napoleon is worshipped 
with all a woman's fervour, and the days of 
triumph for the Grand Army looked back to 
as a dream of glory, which has rendered all 
the remainder of life worthless and insipid. 

The Memoirs of Marshal Ney appear under 
different auspices from any others which have 
yet appeared regarding this eventful era. They 
do not profess to have been written by him- 
self; and, indeed, the warlike habits, and 
sudden and tragic death of the marshal, pre- 
clude the possibility of their being ushered 
forth to the world under that character. But, 
on the other hand, they are unquestionably 
published by his family, from the documents 



and papers in their possession; and the anec- 
dotes with which they are interspersed have 
plainly been collected with great pains from 
all the early friends of that illustrious warrior. 
If they are not published, therefore, under 
the sanction of personal, they are under that 
of family responsibility, and may be regarded, 
as we would say in England, as "the Ney Pa- 
pers," connected together by an interesting 
biography of the character to whom they 
refer. 

In such a production, historical impartiality 
cannot be reasonably expected. To those of 
his family who still mourn the tragic end of 
the bravest of French heroes, his character 
must still be the object of veneration. Fail- 
ings which would have been acknowledged, 
defects which would have been pointed out, if 
he had descended to an honoured tomb, are 
forgotten in his melancholy fate; and his 
family, with hearts ulcerated at the supposed 
injustice and perhaps real illegality of his 
condemnation, are rather disposed to magnify 
his character into that of a martyr, than ac- 
knowledge its alliance with any of the weak- 
nesses or faults of mortality. In such feel- 
ings, there is not only every thing that is 
natural, but much that is commendable; and 
the impartial foreigner, in reviewing the his- 
tory of his achievements, will not forget the 
painful sense of duty under which the British 
government acted at the close of his career, 
or the mournful feelings with which the axe 
of justice was permitted to descend on one of 
the bravest of the human race, under the feel- 
ing — whether right or not it is the province 
of history to inquire — of imperious state 
necessity. 

Marshal Ney was born at Sarrelouis, on the 
10th January, 1769; consequently, he was 
twenty years old when the Revolution first 
broke out. His father was an old soldier, who 
had served with distinction at the battle of 
Rosbach; but after his discharge, he conti- 
nued the profession of a cooper, to which he 
had been early educated. At school, his son, 
the young Ney, evinced the turbulent vigour 
of his disposition, and the future general was 
incessantly occupied in drilling and directing 
his comrades. Napoleon gave tokens of the 
same disposition at an equally early period : 
there is no turn of mind which so early 
evinces itself as a taste for military achieve- 
ments. He was at firtt destined for a notary's 
office; but in spite of the earnest entreaties of 
his parents, he resolved to change his profes- 
sion. At the age of fifteen, our author gives 
the following interesting account of the cir- 
cumstances which led to his embracing the 
profession of arms. 

"So early as when he was fifteen, Ney had 
a presentiment of his future destiny. His 
father, incapable alike of estimating his pow- 
ers, or sharing his hopes, in vain endeavoured 
to restrain him. The mines of Assenwider at 
that period were in full activity; he sent his 
son there, to endeavour to give a new direc- 
tion to his thoughts. It had quite an opposite 
effect. His imagination soon resumed its 
wonted courses. He dreamed only of fields 
of battle, combats and glory. The counsels 
H 



86 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



of his father, the tears of his mother, were 
alike ineffectual : they lacerated without mov- 
ing his heart. Two years passed away in this 
manner ; but his taste for arms became every 
day more decided. The places where he 
dwelt, contributed to strengthen the natural 
bent of his genius. Almost all the towns on 
the Rhine are fortified; wherever he went, he 
saw garrisons, uniforms, and artillery. Ney 
could withstand it no longer; he resigned his 
humble functions, and set out for Metz, where 
a regiment of hussars was stationed, with the 
intention of enlisting. The grief which he 
well knew that sudden determination would 
cause to his mother, the chagrin which it 
would occasion to his father, agitated his 
mind; he hesitated long what to do, but at 
length filial piety prevailed over fear, and he 
returned to Sarrelouis to embrace his parents, 
and bid them adieu. 

"The interview was painful, his reception 
stormy ; reproaches, tears, prayers, menaces, 
alternately tore his heart. At length he tore 
himself from their arms, and flying in haste, 
without either baggage, linen, or money, he 
regained the route of Metz, from which he 
had turned. He walked on foot; his feet 
were soon blistered, his shoes were stained 
with blood. Sad, harassed, and worn out 
with fatigue, he nevertheless continued his 
march without flinching; and in his very first 
debut, gave proof of that invincible determi- 
nation which no subsequent obstacles were 
able to overcome. 

"At an after period, when fortune had 
smiled on his path, he returned to Sarrelouis. 
The artillery sounded ; the troops were under 
arms ; all the citizens crowded to see their 
compatriot of whom they were so proud. Re- 
cognising then the road which thirteen years 
before he had traversed on foot, the marshal 
recounted with emotion his first fatigues to 
the officers who surrounded him." — I. 5, 6. 

It has frequently been observed, that those 
who rise from humble beginnings are ashamed 
in subsequent life of their commencement, 
and degrade themselves by a puerile endea- 
vour to trace their origin to a family of dis- 
tinction. Ney, equally with Napoleon, was 
above that meanness. 

"Never in subsequent life did the marshal 
forget the point from which he had started. 
After he had arrived at the highest point of his 
fortune, he took a pleasure in recurring to his 
humble origin. When some persons were 
declaiming in his presence on their connection 
Avith the noblesse, and what they had obtained 
from their rich families: — 'You were more 
fortunate than I,' said he, interrupting them; 
' I received nothing from my family, and 
deemed myself rich when, at Metz, I had two 
pieces of bread on the board.' 

"After he was named a marshal of the em- 
pire, he held a splendid levee : every one 
offered his congratulations, and hastened to 
present his compliments. He interrupted the 
adulatory strain by addressing himself to an 
old officer who kept at a distance. ' Do you 
recollect, captain, the time when you said to 
me, on occasion of my presenting my report, 
Well done, Ney ; I am well pleased with you ; 



go on as you have begun, you will make your 
fortune.' ' Perfectly, marshal,' replied his old 
commander; 'I had the honour to command 
a man infinitely my superior. Such good for- 
tune is not easily forgotten.' 

" The satisfaction which he experienced at 
recurring to his origin, arose not merely from 
the noble pride of having been the sole archi- 
tect of his fortune, but also from the warm 
affection which he ever felt for his family. 
He loved nothing so much as to recount the 
tenderness which he had experienced from his 
mother, and the good counsels which he had 
received from his father. Thus, when he was 
abandoning himself to all the dangers arising 
from an impetuous courage, he carefully con- 
cealed his perils from his parents and rela- 
tions, to save them from useless anxiety. On 
one occasion, he commanded the advanced 
guard of General Colaud, and was engaged in 
a serious action. Overwhelmed with fatigue, 
he returned and recounted to his comrades the 
events of the day. One of his friends blamed 
him for his imprudence. ' It is very true,' 
replied Ney, ' I have had singular good for- 
tune to-day; four different times I found my- 
self alone in the midst of the Austrians. 
Nothing but the most extraordinary good for- 
tune extricated me out of their hands.' 'You 
have been more fortunate than your brother.' 
' What,' replied Ney, impetuously, and fixing 
his eyes anxiously on his friend, 'is my bro- 
ther dead 1 Ah ! my poor mother !' At length 
he learned the mournful news, that in a 
serious affair in Italy, Pierre Ney, his elder 
brother, had been killed. He burst into tears, 
and exclaimed, ' What would have become of 
my mother and sister, if I too had fallen ! 
Write to them, I pray you; but conceal the 
dangers to which I am exposed, that they may 
not fear also for my life.' The father of the 
marshal died a few years ago, at the age of 
nearly a hundred years. He loved his son 
with tenderness mingled with respect, and al- 
though of a singularly robust habit of body, 
his family feared the effect of the shock which 
the sad events of 1815 might produce upon 
him. He was never informed of them : the 
mourning of his daughter, with whom he 
lived, and of his grandchildren, only made 
him aware that some dreadful calamity had 
befallen the family. He ventured to ask no 
questions, and ever since, sad and melancholy, 
pronouncing but rarely the name of his son, 
he lingered on till 1826, when he died without 
having learned his tragic fate." — I. 9, 10. 

The great characteristic of Marshal Ney 
was his impetuous courage, which gained for 
him, even among the giants of the era of Na- 
poleon, the surname of the Bravest of the 
Brave. This remarkable characteristic is 
thus described in these Memoirs : — 

"It is well known with what power and 
energy he could rouse the masses of the sol- 
diers, and precipitate them upon the enemy. 
Vehement and impetuous when heading a 
charge, he was gifted with the most imper- 
turbable sang froid when it became necessary 
to sustain its movements. Dazzled by the 
lustre of that brilliant valour, many persons 
have imagined that it was the only illustrious 



MARSHAL KEY. 



87 



quality which the marshal possessed ; but 
those who were nearer his person, and better 
acquainted with his character, will concede to 
him greater qualities than the enthusiasm 
which captivates and subjugates the soldier. 
Calm in the midst of a storm of grape-shot — 
imperturbable amid a shower of balls and 
shells, Ney seemed to be ignorant of danger; 
to have nothing to fear from death. This 
rashness, which twenty years of perils have 
not diminished, gave to his mind the liberty, 
the promptitude of judgment and execution, 
so necessary in the midst of the complicated 
movements of war. This quality astonished 
those who surrounded him, more even than 
the courage in action which is more or less 
felt by all who are habituated to the dangers 
of war. One of his officers, whose courage 
had repeatedly been put to the proof, asked 
him one day if he had never felt fear. Re- 
gaining instantly that profound indifference 
for danger, that forgetfulness of "death, that 
elasticity of mind, which distinguished him on 
the field of battle, ' I have never had time,' 
replied the marshal with simplicity. 

"Nevertheless, this extraordinary coolness 
in danger did not prevent his perceiving those 
slight shades of weakness, from which it is so 
rarely that a soldier is to be found entirely 
exempted. On one occasion, an officer was 
giving an account of a mission on which he 
had been sent : while he spoke, a bullet passed 
so near him that he involuntarily lowered his 
head, but nevertheless continued his narrative 
without exhibiting emotion — 'You have done 
extremely well,' said the marshal, 'but next 
time do not bow quite so low.' 

" The marshal loved courage, and took the 
greatest pleasure in producing it in others. If 
he had witnessed it in a great degree in any 
one on the field of battle ; if he had discovered 
vigour, capacity, or military genius, he never 
rested till he had obtained their promotion ; 
and the army resounded for long with the 
efforts which he made for this purpose." — I. 21. 

But it was not mere valour or capacity on 
the field of battle, which distinguished Ney; 
he was attentive also to the minutest wants of 
his soldiers, and indefatigable in his endea- 
vours to procure for them those accommoda- 
tions, of which, from having risen from the 
humblest rank himself, he so well knew how 
to appreciate the value. Of his efforts in this 
respect we have the following interesting ac- 
count: — 

"Quick in repressing excesses, the marshal 
omitted nothing to prevent them. A private 
soldier in early life, he had himself felt the 
sufferings endured by the private soldier, and 
when elevated to a higher station he did his 
utmost to assuage them in others. He knew 
that the soldier, naturally just and grateful to 
those who watched over his interests, was 
difficult to manage when his complaints were 
neglected, and it was evident that his superiors 
had no sympathy for his fatigues or his priva- 
tions. Ney was sincerely attached to those 
great masses, which, though composed of men 
of such different characters, were equally 
ieady every day to meet dangers and death in 
the discharge of duty. At that period our 



troops, worn out with the fatigues of war, ac- 
customed to make light of dangers, were much 
ruder in their manners, and haughty in their 
ideas, than those of these times, who lead a 
pacific life in great cities and garrisons. The 
marshal was incessant in his endeavours to 
discover and correct the abuses which affected 
them. He ever endeavoured to prevent their 
wishes, and to convince the officers who com- 
manded them, that by elevating the soldier in 
his own eyes, and treating him with the respect 
which he deserves, but without any diminution 
of the necessary firmness, it was alone possible 
to obtain 'that forgetfulness of himself, that 
abandonment of military discipline, which 
constitutes so large a portion of military force. 

"Avoiding, therefore, in the most careful 
way, the imposition of unnecessary burdens 
upon the soldiers, he was equally careful to 
abstain from that vain ostentation of author- 
ity, that useless prodigality of escort, which 
generals of inferior calibre are so fond of dis- 
playing. His constant object was to spare the 
troops engaged in that fatiguing service, and 
not to diminish, but from absolute necessity, 
by such detachments, the numerical strength 
of the regiments under his orders. That soli- 
citude did not escape the soldiers; and among 
their many subjects of gratitude, they ranked 
in ihe foremost place the continual care and 
perseverance with which their general secured 
for them the means of subsistence. The pro- 
digies he effected in that particular will be 
found fully detailed in the campaign of Portu- 
gal, where he succeeded, in a country repeat- 
edly devastated, in providing, by incredible 
exertions, not only provisions for his own 
corps, but the whole army, during the six 
months that it remained in Portugal. Con- 
stantly in motion on the Mondego, inces- 
santly pushing columns in every direction, 
he contrived to procure bread, clothes, provi- 
sions, in fine, every thing which was required. 
The recollection of these things remaine \ 
engraven on the minds of his soldiers, and 
when his division with Massena caused him 
to resign the command of his corps, the grief 
of the soldiers, the murmurs, the first symp- 
toms of an insurrection ready to break forth, 
and which a single word from their chief 
would have blown into aflame, were sufficient 
to prove that his cares had not been thrown 
away on ungrateful hearts, and that his multi- 
plied attentions had won all their affections. 

" But his careful attention to his soldiers did 
not prevent him from maintaining the most 
rigorous discipline, and punishing severely 
any considerable excess on the part of the 
troops under his command. An instance of 
this occurred in the country of Darmstadt. 
The Austrians had been defeated, and retired 
near to Swigemberg, where they were broken 
anew. The action was warmly contested, and 
our soldiers, irritated by so much resistance, 
broke open several houses and plundered them. 
The circumstances in which it occurred might 
excuse the transgression, but Ney resolved to 
make a signal example of reparation. While 
he proceeded with the utmost severity against 
the offenders, he published a proclamation, in 
which he directed that the damage should be 



88 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



estimated ; and in order that it should not be 
fixed at an elusory sum, he charged the Land- 
grave himself with the valuation. 

" When Governor of Gallicia and Salamanca, 
these provinces, notwithstanding their hatred 
at the yoke of the stranger, cheerfully acknow- 
ledged the justice of his administration. One 
only object of spoil has been left by the mar- 
shal to his family, a relic of St. James of Com- 
postella, which the monks of the convent of 
St. Jago presented to him, in gratitude for the 
humanity with which he treated them. He did 
not limit his care to the protection of property 
from pillage ; he knew that there are yet 
dearer interests to which honour is more 
nearly allied, and he never ceased to cause 
them to be respected. The English army will 
bear testimony to his solicitude in that parti- 
cular. Obliged, after the battle of Corunna, to 
embark in haste, they were unable to place on 
board the women by whom they were followed, 
and in consequence, fifty were left on the shore, 
where they were wandering about without pro- 
tection, exposed to the insults of the soldiers. 
No sooner was Ney informed of their situa- 
tion, than he hastened to come to their suc- 
cour; he assembled them, assured them of his 
protection, and directed that they should be 
placed in a female convent. But the Superior 
refused to admit them ; she positively refused 
to have any thing to do with heretics ; no en- 
treaties could persuade her to extend to these 
unfortunates the rites of hospitalitv. 

"'Be it so,' replied the marshal; 'I under- 
stand your scruples ; and, therefore, instead of 
these Protestants, you shall furnish lodgings 
to two companies of Catholic grenadiers.' Ne- 
cessity, at length, bent the hard-hearted Abbess ; 
and these unhappy women, for the most part 
the wives or daughters of officers or non-com- 
missioned officers, whose bravery we had ex- 
perienced in the field, were received into the 
convent, where they were protected from every 
species of injury." — I. 39 — 41. 

We have no doubt of the truth of this last 
anecdote, and we may add that Ney not only 
respected the remains of Sir John Moore, 
interred in the ramparts of Corunna, but 
erected a monument to his memory. It is 
soothing to see the Freemasonry of generous 
feeling, which subsists between the really 
brave and elevated, under all the varieties of 
national rivalry or animosity, in every part of 
the world. 

It is a pleasing task to record traits of gene- 
rosity in an enemy; but war is not composed 
entirely of such actions; and, as a specimen 
of the mode in which the Republican troops, 
in the first years of their triumphs, oppressed 
the people whom they professed to deliver, we 
subjoin the following account of the mode in 
which they levied their requisitions, taken 
from the report of one of the Envoys of Go- 
vernment to the Convention. 

"Cologne, 8th October, 1794. 
"The agents sent to make requisitions, my 
dear colleagues, act in such a manner as to 
revolt all the world. The moment they arrive 
in a town, they lay a requisition on every 
thing; literally every thing. No one thereafter 
can either buy or sell. Thus we see com- 



merce paralyzed, and for how long? For an 
indefinite time ; for there are many requisi- 
tions which have been laid on a month ago, 
and on which nothing has yet been demanded; 
and during that whole period the inhabitants 
were unable to purchase any articles even of the 
first necessity. If such measures are not cal- 
culated to produce a counter-revolutionary 
reaction ; if they are not likely to rouse against 
us the indignation of all mankind, I ask you 
what are ? 

" Safety and fraternity. — Gellit." I. 53. 
Contrast this conduct on the part of the 
Friends of the People, as detailed by one of 
their own representatives to his democratic 
rulers, with the conduct of the Duke of Wel- 
lington, paying high prices for every article 
required by the English army in the south of 
France, and we have the best proof of the dif- 
ference between the actions of a Conservative 
and Revolutionary Government. 

The life of a soldier who spent twenty years 
in camps, of course furnishes abundant ma- 
terials for the description of military adventure. 
We select, almost at random, the following de- 
scription of the passage of the Rhine, opposite 
Ehivnbreitzin, by the corps of Kleber, in 1795. 
" The fort of Ehrenbreitzin commanded the 
month of Moselle ; the batteries of the right 
bank swept all the shores of the Rhine. The 
enemy were quite aware of our design; the 
moon shone bright; and his soldiers, with 
anxious eyes and listening ears, waited the 
moment when our boats might come within 
reach of his cannon. The danger was great ; 
but that of hesitation was still greater; we 
abandoned ourselves to our fate, and pushed 
across towards Neuwied. Instantly the forts 
and the batteries thundered with unexampled 
violence ; a shower of grape-shot fell in our 
boats. But there is something in great danger 
which elevates the mind. Our pontonniers 
made a sport of death, as of the batteries 
which were successively unmasked, and join- 
ing their efforts to the current which swept 
them along, at length reached the dikes on 
the opposite shore. Neuwied also opened its 
fire. That, delicious town, embellished by 
all the arts of peace, now transformed into a 
warlike stronghold, overwhelmed us by the 
fire of its batteries. We replied with vigour, 
but for long felt a repugnance to direct our 
fire against that charming city. At length, 
however, necessitv compelled us to make the 
attack, and in a few hours Neuwied was re- 
duced to ashes. 

"The difficulties of the enterprise neverthe- 
less remained. It was necessary to overcome 
a series of redoubts, covered by chevaux-de- 
frize, palisades, and covered ways. We had 
at once to carry Dusseldorf and beat the Count 
d'Hirbauch, who awaited our approach at the 
head of 20,000 men. Kleber alone did not des- 
pair ; the batteries on the left shore were ready, 
and the troops impatiently awaited the signal 
to land. The dispositions were soon made. 
Lefebvre attacked the left, Championnet the 
centre, Grenier the right. Such leaders could 
not but inspire confidence in the men. Soldiers 
and officers leapt ashore. We braved the storm 
of grape-shot ; and on the 5th September, at 



MARSHAL NEY. 



89 



break of day, we were established on the Ger- 
man hank of the river." — I. 99 — 101. 

These Memoirs abound with passages of 
this description; and if implicit faith is to be 
given to them, it appears certain that Ney from 
ttfie very first was distinguished by a degree 
of personal gallantry, as well as military con- 
duct, which has been rarely paralleled, and 
never exceeded. The description of his ele- 
vation to the rank of General Brigade, and the 
action which preceded it, is singularly de- 
scriptive of the character of the French armies 
at that period. 

" Meanwhile Mortier made himself master of 
Ebermanstadt, Collaud advanced upon For- 
chiers. His orders were to drive back every 
opponent whom he found in the plain, and 
disperse every force which attempted to cover 
the place. The task was difficult; the avenues 
leading to it, the heights around it, were equally 
guarded ; and Wartensleben, in the midst of 
his soldiers, was exhorting them not to per- 
mit their impregnable position to be carried. 
It presented, in truth, every obstacle that could 
well be imagined; they were abrupt, covered 
with woods, surrounded by deep ravines. To 
these obstacles of nature were joined all the 
resources of art ; on this height were placed 
masses of soldiers, that was crowned with ar- 
tillery; infantry was stationed at the summit 
of the defiles, cavalry at their mouths; on 
every side the resistance promised to be of the 
most formidable description. Ney, however. 
was not to be deterred by such obstacles ; he 
advanced at the head of a handful of heroes, 
and opened his fire. He had only two pieces 
of artillery; the enemy speedily unmasked 
fourteen. His troop was for a moment shaken 
by the violence of the fire ; but it was ac- 
customed to all the chances of war. It speedily 
re-formed, continued the attack, and succeeded, 
after an obstinate struggle, in throwing the ene- 
my's ranks into disorder. Some reinforcements 
soon afterwards arrived ; the melee grew 
warmer; and at length the Austrians, over- 
whelmed and broken, evacuated the position, 
which they found themselves unable to defend. 

" Kleber, charmed with that brilliant achieve- 
ment, testified the warmest satisfaction with it 
to the young officer. He addressed to him, 
at the head of his troop, the most flattering ex- 
pressions upon his activity, skill, and courage, 
and concluded with these words, 'I will no 
longer hurt your modesty by continuing my 
praises-! My line is taken; you are a Gene- 
ral of Brigade.' The chasseurs clapped their 
hands, and the officers loudly testified their 
satisfaction. Ne) r alone remained pensive ; he 
even seemed to hesitate Avhether he should ac- 
cept the rank, and did not utter a single word. 
' Well,' continued Kleber, in the kindest man- 
ner, 'you seem very confused; but the Aus- 
trians are those who will speedily make 3'ou 
forget your ennui ; as for me, I will forthwith 
report your promotion to the Directory.' He 
dii so in effect, and it was confirmed by return 
of post." — I. 186. 

It is still a question undecided, whether Na- 
poleon intended seriously to invade England, 
or whether his great preparations in the Chan- 
nel were a feint merely to give employment 
12 



to his troops, and cover other designs. Bour- 
rienne maintains that he never in reality in- 
tended to attempt the descent; and that, un- 
known to every one, he was organizing his 
expedition into the heart of Germany at the 
time when all around him imagined that he 
was studying only the banks of the Thames. 
Napoleon himself affirms the contrary. He 
asserts that he was quite serious in his inten- 
tion of invading England ; that he was fully 
aware of the risks with which the attempt 
would have been attended, but was willing to 
have braved them for so great an object; and 
that the defeat of the combined squadron by 
Sir Robert Calder, frustrated the best combined 
plan he had ever laid during his whole career. 
His plan, as detailed in the instructions given 
to Villeneuve, printed in the appendix to his 
Memoirs, was to have sent the combined fleet 
to the West Indies, in order to draw after it 
Lord Nelson's squadron ; and to have immedi- 
ately brought it back, raised the blockade of 
Ferrol and Corunna, and proceeded with the 
combined fleet to join the squadrons of Rochelle 
and Brest, where twenty sail of the line were 
ready for sea, and brought the combined squad- 
ron into the Channel to cover the embarkation 
of the army. In this way, by a sudden con- 
centration of all his naval force, he calculated 
upon having seventy sail of the line in the 
Channel; a much greater force than, in the ab- 
sence of Lord Nelson, the British could have 
at once assembled to meet him. When we 
recollect that Lord Nelson fell into the snare, 
and actually pursued the combined fleets to 
the West Indies; that in pursuance of Na- 
poleon's design, Villeneuve reached Ferrol, 
and that it was in consequence only of his un- 
successful action with Sir Robert Calder, that 
he was induced to fall back to Cadiz, and there- 
by cause the whole plan to miscarry; it is 
evident that the fate of Britain then hung upon 
a thread, and that if the English admiral had 
been defeated, and the combined fleet had pro- 
ceeded up the Channel, the invasion might have 
been effected, and the fate of the civilized world 
been changed. It is a singular proof of the 
sagacity of Lord Collingwood, that at the very 
time when this well-combined plan was in 
progress on Napoleon's side, he divined the 
enemy's intentions, and in a memorial address- 
ed to the Admiralty, and published in his Me- 
moirs, pointed out the danger arising from the 
precise plan which his great antagonist was 
adopting; and it is a still more singular in- 
stance of the injustice and precipitance of 
public opinion, that the British government 
were compelled to bring the admiral to a 
court-martial, and dismiss him from the ser- 
vice, because, with fifteen ships of the line, he 
had maintained a glorious combat with twenty- 
Seven, captured two of their line, and defeated 
the greatest and best combined project ever 
formed by the Emperor Napoleon. 

As every thing relating to this critical pe- 
riod of the war is of the very highest interest 
in Great Britain, we shall translate the pas- 
sages of Ney's Memoirs, which throw light 
upon the vast preparations then made on the 
other side of the Channel. 

"Meanwhile time passed on, and England, 
h 2 



90 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



a little recovered from its consternation, but 
nevertheless the real place of attack, always 
escaped its government. Four thousand gun- 
boats covered the coast; the construction of 
praams and rafts went on without intermission ; 
every thing announced that the invasion was 
to be effected by main force, and by means of 
the flotilla which made so much noise. If the 
strife was doubtful, it at least had its chance 
of success; but while England was daily be- 
coming more confident of success in repelling 
that aggression, the preparations for the real 
attack were approaching to maturity. Napoleon 
never seriously intended to traverse the Chan- 
nel under cover of a fog, by the aid of a favour- 
able wind, or by the force of such frail vessels 
of war as gun-boats. His arrangements were 
better made; and all that splendid display of 
gun-boats was only intended to deceive the 
enemy. He wished to disperse the force which 
he could not combat when assembled together. 
In pursuance of this plan, his fleets were to 
have assembled from Toulon, Rochfort, Cadiz, 
Brest, and Ferrol, draw after them to the West 
Indies the British blockading squadrons, and 
return rapidly on their steps, and present them- 
selves in the Channel before the English were 
well aware that they had crossed the Line. 
Master in this way of a preponderating force, 
riding irresistibly in the Channel, he would have 
embarked on board his flotilla the troops with 
which he would have made himself master of 
London, and revolutionized England, before 
that immense marine, which he could never 
have faced when assembled together, could 
have collected for its defence. These different 
expeditions, long retained in their different har- 
bours, had at length set sail ; the troops had 
received orders to be ready to put themselves 
instantly on board ; the instructions to the 
general had foreseen every thing, provided for 
every emergency ; the vessels assigned to each 
troop, the order in which they were to fall out 
of the harbour, were all fixed. Arms, horses, 
artillery, combatants, camp-followers, all had 
received their place, all were arranged accord- 
ing to their orders. 

" Marshal Ney had nothing to do but follow 
out literally his instructions ; they were so 
luminous and precise as to provide for every 
contingency. He distributed the powder, the 
tools, the projectiles, which were to accompany 
his corps on board the transports provided for 
that purpose. He divided that portion of the 
flotilla assigned to him into subdivisions; 
every regiment, every battalion, every com- 
pany, received the praams destined for their 
use; every one, down to the very last man, 
was ready to embark at the first signal. He 
did more ; rapidity of movement requires com- 
bined exertions, and he resolved to habituate 
the troops to embarkation. The divisions were 
successively brought down to the quay, and 
embarked in the finest order; but it was possi- 
ble that when assembled hurriedly together, 
they might be less calm and orderly. The 
Marshal resolved to put it to the proof. 

"Infantry, cavalry, artillery, were at once 
put under arms, and ranged opposite to the 
vessels on which they were to embark. The 
whole were formed in platoons for embarka- 



tion, at small distances from each other. A 
cannon was discharged ; the field-officers and 
staff-officers immediately dismounted, and 
placed themselves each at the head of the 
troop he was destined to command. The drums 
had ceased to beat; the soldiers had unfixed 
their bayonets ; a second discharge louder than 
the first was heard ; the generals of divisions 
pass the order to the colonels. 'Make ready 
to embark.' Instantly a calm succeeds to the 
tumult; everyone listens attentively, eagerly 
watching for the next order, on which so much 
depended. A third cannon is heard, and the 
command ' Colonels, forward,' is heard with 
indescribable anxiety along the line. In fine 
a last discharge resounds, and is instantly fol- 
lowed by the order, ' March !' — Universal ac- 
clamations instantly broke forth; the soldiers 
hurried on board ; in ten minutes and a half 
twenty-five thousand men were embarked. 
The soldiers never entertained a doubt that 
they were about to set sail. They arranged 
themselves, and each took quarters for him- 
self; when the cannon again sounded, the 
drums beat to arms, they formed ready for 
action on the decks. A last gun is discharged ; 
every one believed it was the signal to weigh 
anchor, and shouts of Vive I' Emperew rent the 
air, but it was the signal for debarkation, 
which was effected silently and with deep re- 
gret. It was completed, however, as rapidly 
as the embarkation, and in thirteen minutes 
from the time when the soldiers were on 
board, they were arranged in battle array on 
the shore. 

"Meanwhile the English had completely 
fallen into the snare. The fleet which cruised 
before Rochfort had no sooner seen Admiral 
Missiessy running down before the wind, than 
it set sail in pursuit. Villeneuve, who started 
from Toulon in the middle of a violent tem- 
pest, was obliged to return to the harbour; but 
such was Nelson's anxiety to meet him, that 
he set sail first for Egypt, then for the West In- 
dies. The Mediterranean was speedily cleared 
of English vessels ; their fleets wandered 
through the Atlantic, without knowing where 
to find the enemy; the moment to strike a 
decisive stroke had arrived. 

" The unlooked for return of Missiessy frus- 
trated all these calculations. He had sailed 
like an arrow to Martinique, and returned still 
more rapidly: but the English now retained 
at home the squadrons which they had original- 
ly intended to have sent for the defence of 
Jamaica. Our situation in consequence was 
less favourable than w _ e had expected ; but, 
nevertheless, there was nothing to excite un- 
easiness. We had fifteen ships of the line at 
Ferrol, six at Cadiz, five at Rochfort, twenty- 
one at Brest. Villeneuve was destined to rally 
them, join them to the twenty which he had 
under his orders, and advancing at the head 
of an overwhelming force, make himself mas- 
ter of the Channel. He left Toulon on the 
30th March, and on the 23d June he was at the 
Azores, on his return to Europe, leaving Nelson 
still in the West Indies. But at the very mo- 
ment when every one flattered himself that 
our vessels would speedily arrive to protect 
the embarkation of the army, we learnt that, 



MARSHAL NEY. 



91 



deterred by a cannonade of a few hours, and 
the loss of two ships, (Sir R. Calder's battle,) 
he had taken refuge in Ferrol. A mournful 
feeling took possession of our minds ; every 
one complained that a man should be so im- 
measurably beneath his destiny. 

"All hope, however, was not lost; the em- 
peror still retained it. He continued his dis- 
positions, and incessantly urged the advance 
of the marine. Every one flattered himself 
that Villeneuve, penetrated with the greatness 
of his mission, would at length put to sea, join 
Gautheame, disperse the fleet of Cornwallis, 
and at length make his appearance in the 
Channel. But an unhappy fatality drew him 
on. He only left Ferrol to throw himself into 
Cadiz. It was no longer possible to count on 
the support of his squadron. The emperor in 
vain attempted other expedients, and made 
repeated attempts to embark. Nothing could 
succeed for want of the covering squadron ; 
and soon the Battle of Trafalgar and the 
Austrian war postponed the conquest of Eng- 
land to another age." — II. 259 — 262. 

This passage, as well as all the others in 
Napoleon's Memoirs, which are of a similar 
import, are calulated, in our opinion, to excite 
the most singular feelings. They demonstrate, 
beyond a doubt, of what incalculable import- 
ance Sir Robert Calder's action was ; and that, 
more than even the triumph of Trafalgar, it 
fixed the destinies of Britain. The great victory 
of Nelson did not occur till the 21st October, 
and months before that the armies of Napo- 
leon had been transported from the shores of 
Boulogne to the heart of Germany, and were 
irrevocably engaged in a contest with Austria 
and Russia. It was Sir Robert Calder's action 
which broke the course of Napoleon's designs, 
and chained his armies to the shore, at the 
very time when they were ready to have 
passed over, with a second Cassar, to the shores 
of Britain. It is melancholy to think of the 
fate of the gallant officer, under the dictation 
of that impartial judge, the popular voice, 
whose skill and bravery achieved these great 
results. 

It is a curious speculation, now that the 
event is over, what would have been the fate 
of England, if Napoleon, with one hundred 
and fifty thousand men, had, in consequence 
of the success of these combinations, landed 
on the shores of Sussex. We are now com- 
pelled, with shame and sorrow, to doubt the 
doctrine which, till the last three years, we 
held on this subject. We fear, there is a great 
probability that he would have achieved the 
overthrow of the British empire. Not that 
the mere force of Napoleon's army, great as it 
was, could have in the end subjugated the de- 
scendants of the conquerors of Cressy and 
Azicour. The examples of Vimiera, Maida, 
Alexandria, Corunna, and Waterloo, where 
English troops, who had never seen a shot 
fired in anger, at once defeated the veterans 
of France, even when commanded by the 
ablest officers, is sufficient to prove the reverse. 
England was invincible, if she remained faith- 
ful to herself. But would she have remained 
faithful to herself] That is the question. The 
events of the last three years have awakened 



us to the mournful fear, that she would not. It 
is now proved, by sad experience, that we 
possess within ourselves a numerous, power- 
ful, and energetic faction, insatiable in am- 
bition, unextinguishable in resources, deaf to 
every call of patriotism, dead to every feeling 
of hereditary glory. To them national triumph 
is an object of regret, because it was achieved 
under the banners of their opponents ; national 
humiliation an object of indifference, provided 
they are elevated by it to the reins of power. 
With burning hearts and longing eyes they 
watched the career of the French Revolution, 
ever eulogizing its principles, palliating its 
excesses, vituperating its adversaries. Mr. 
Fox pronounced in Parliament the Constitu- 
tion framed by the Constituent Assembly, to 
be " the most astonishing fabric of wisdom 
and virtue which patriotism had reared in any 
age or country, on the ruins of ignorance and 
superstition." And when this astonishing 
fabric produced Danton and Robespierre, and 
hatched the Reign of Terror, he showed no 
disposition to retract the opinion. Two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand Irishmen, we are told 
by Wolfe Tone, were united, drilled, regimented 
and organized, to effect the separation of Ire- 
land from Great Britain ; and if we may be- 
lieve Mr. Moore, in his Life of Lord Edward 
Fitzgerald, Mr. Fox was no stranger to their 
treasonable intentions at the very time when 
he earnestly supported their demand for Parlia- 
mentary Reform. During the last three years 
we have seen this party systematically undo 
every think which their predecessors had 
effected during half a century of unexampled 
glory; abandon, one by one, all the objects of 
our continental policy, the Dutch barrier, the 
protection of Portugal, the independence of 
Holland, the integrity of Turkey ; unite the 
leopard and the tricolor in an inglorious 
crusade against the independence of the sur- 
rounding states ; beat down Holland by open 
force, and subvert Portugal by feigned neutrali- 
ty and real hostility ; force the despots of 
Northern Europe into a dangerous defensive 
combination, and unite the arms of constitu- 
tional freedom with those of democratic am- 
bition in the South ; and, to gain a deceitful 
popularity for a few years, sacrifice the Con- 
stitution, which had for two hundred years 
conferred unexampled prosperity on their 
country. The men who have done these 
things, could not have been relied on when 
assailed by the insidious arts and deceitful 
promises of Napoleon. 

Napoleon has told us, in his Memoirs, how 
he proposed to have subjugated England. He 
would have overcome it, as he overcame Swit- 
zerland, Venice, and all the states which did 
not meet him with uncompromising hostility. 
He would instantly, on landing, have pub- 
lished a proclamation, in which he declared 
that he came to deliver the English from the 
oligarchy under which they had groaned for 
three centuries; and for this end he would 
have promised annual parliaments, universal 
suffrage, vote by ballot, the confiscation of the 
Church property, the abolition of the Corn 
Laws, and all the objects of Whig or Radical 
ambition. By these offers he would have 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



thrown the apple of eternal discord and divi- 
sion into Great Britain. The republican trans- 
ports which broke out with such vehemence 
on the announcement of the Reform Bill in 
1831, would have been instantly heard on the 
landing of the tricolor-flag on the throne of 
England: and the divisions now so irrecover- 
ably established amongsi us, would have at 
once arisen in presence of a gigantic and en- 
terprising enemy. There can be little doubt, 
we fear, what a considerable portion of the 
Movement party in England, and the whole of 
it in Ireland, would have done. They would, 
heart and hand, have joined the enemy of their 
country. Conceiving that they were doing 
what was best for its inhabitants — they would 
have established a republic in close alliance 
with France, and directed the whole resources 
of England to support the cause of democracy 
all over the world. Meanwhile, Napoleon, 
little solicitous about their political dogmas, 
would have steadily fixed his iron grasp on 
the great watlike establishments of the coun- 
try; Portsmouth, Plymouth, Woolwich, Chat- 
ham, Sheerness, Deptford, and Carron, would 
have fallen into his hands ; the army would 
have been exiled or disbanded; and if his 
new democratical allies proved at all trouble- 
some in the House of Commons, he would 
have dispersed them with as little ceremony, 
by a file of grenadiers, as he did the Council 
of Five Hundred in the Orangery of St. Cloud. 

It is with pain and humiliation that we 
make this confession. Five years ago we 
should have held any man a foul libeller on 
the English character who should have de- 
clared such conduct as probable in any part 
of the English opposition ; and we should 
have relied with as much confidence on the 
whole liberal party to resist the aggressions 
of France, as we should on the warmest ad- 
herents of government. It is their own conduct, 
since they came into power, which has unde- 
ceived us, and opened our eyes to the immen- 
sity of the danger to which the country was 
exposed, when her firm patriots at the helm 
nailed her colors to the mast. But regarding, 
as we do, with perfect sincerity, the Reform 
Bill as the parent of a much greater change 
in our national institutions than a conquest by 
France would have been, and the passing of 
that measure as a far more perilous, because 
more irremediable leap in the dark, than if 
we had thrown ourselves into the arms of 
Napoleon, we cannot but consider the subse- 
quent events as singularly illustrative of the 
prior dangers, and regard the expulsion of the 
Whigs from the ministry by the firmness of 
George III., in 1807, as a delivery from greater 
danger than the country had known since the 
Saxon arms were overthrown by William on 
the field of Hastings. 

One of the most brilliant acts of Napoleon 
was his astonishing march from Boulogne to 
Swabia, in 1805, and the admirable skill with 
which he accumulated his forces, converging 
from so many different points round the un- 
fortunate Mack, who lay bewildered at Ulm. — 
In this able undertaking, as well as in the 
combat at Elchingen, which contributed in so 
essential a manner to its success, and from 



which his title of duke was taken, Ney bore 
a conspicuous part. The previous situation 
of the contending powers is thus described by 
our author: 

"The troops which the emperor had under 
his command did not exceed 180,000 men. — 
This was little enough for the strife which 
was about to commence, for the coalition did 
not now merely oppose to us the troops which 
they had in the first line. The allied sove- 
reigns already addressed themselves to the 
multitude, and loudly called on them to take 
up arms in defence of liberty, they turned 
against us the principles which they professed 
their desire to destroy. They roused in Ger- 
many national antipathies : flattered in Italy 
the spirit of independence, scattered every 
where the seeds of insurrection. The masses 
of the people were slow to swallow the bait. 
They appreciated our institutions, and did not 
behold without distrust this sudden burst of 
enthusiasm in sovereigns in favour of the po- 
pular cause: but they readily took fire at the 
recital of the sacrifices which we had imposed 
on them, the promised advantages which we 
had not permitted them to enjoy. The Coali- 
tion prepared to attack us on all the vast line 
which we occupied. Russians, Swedes, Eng- 
lish, Hanoverians, hastened to take a part in 
the strife. The approach of such a mass of 
enemies might have occasioned dangerous 
results ; a single reverse might have involved 
us in a strife with warlike and impatient na- 
tions; but the Austrians had imprudently 
spread themselves through Bavaria, at a time 
when the Russians had hardly as yet passed 
Poland. The emperor did not despair of an- 
ticipating the one and overwhelming the other, 
and thus dissipating that formidable league of 
sovereigns before they were in a situation to 
deploy their forces on the field of battle. The 
blow, according to these calculations, was to 
be struck in Swabia. But from that country 
to Boulogne, where our troops were stationed, 
the distance was nearly the same as to Podo- 
lia, where the Russians had arrived. He 
sought to steal a march upon them to conceal 
for some days the great manoeuvre which he 
meditated. For this purpose, Marmont, whose 
troops were on the coast, when he set out for 
Germany, received orders to give out that he 
was about to take merely other quarters ; and 
Bernadotte, who was stationed in Hanover, to 
encourage the opinion that he was about to 
spend the winter in that country. Meanwhile 
all had orders to hasten their march; all ad- 
vanced with the same celerity ; and when our 
enemies still believed us on the shores of the 
Channel, we were far advanced towards the 
Rhine. The first and second corps had 
reached Mayence ; the third was grouped 
around Manheim ; the fourth had halted in 
the environs of Spire ; the fifth was estab- 
lished at Strasbourg, and the sixth, which had 
started from Montreuil on the 28th August, had 
reached Lauterbourg on the 24th September. 
In that short interval, it had traversed three hun- 
dred leagues, being at the rate of above ten 
leagues a-day. History has nothing to show 
comparable to such celerity." — II. 268 — 270. 

From a soldier of such ability and experi- 



MARSHAL NEY. 



93 



ence much may be expected of value on the 
science of war. In the " Reflections" of the 
marshal, at the end of the second volume, the 
reader will find much interesting matter of that 
description. We select one example: — 

" The defensive system accords ill with the 
disposition of the French soldier, at least if it 
is not to be maintained by successive diver- 
sions and excursions ; — in a word, if you are 
not constantly occupied in that little warfare, 
inactivity destroys the force of troops who 
rest constantly on the defensive. They are 
obliged to be constantly on the alert, night 
and day; while, on the other hand, offensive 
expeditions, wisely combined, raise the spirit 
of the soldier, and prevent him from having 
time to ponder on the real cause of his dan- 
gerous situation. 

" It is in the offensive that you find in the 
French soldier inexhaustible resources. His 
active disposition, and valour in assaults, 
double his power. A general should never 
hesitate to march with the bayonet against the 
enemy, if the ground is favourable for the use 
of that weapon. It is in the attack, in fine, 
that you accustom the French soldier to every 
species of warfare, — alike to brave the ene- 
my's fire, which is generally little hurtful, 
and to leave the field open to the develop- 
ment of his intelligence and courage. 

"One of the greatest difficulties in war is 
to accustom the soldier to the fatigues of 
marching. The other powers of Europe will 
attain with difficulty in this respect the degree 
of perfection which the French soldier pos- 
sesses. His sobriety and physical constitu- 
tion are the real causes of the marked superi- 
ority he has acquired over the Austrians in 
that particular. 

" Rapidity of march, or rather an able com- 
bination of marches, almost invariably deter- 
mine the fate of war. Colonels of infantry, 
therefore, should be indefatigable in their en- 
deavours to train their soldiers progressively to 
ordinary and forced marches. To attain that 
object, so essential in war, it is indispensable 



to oblige the soldier to carry his knapsack on 
his back from the outset of the campaign, in 
order to accustom him to the fatigues which 
in the course- of it he must undergo. The 
health of the soldier depends on this being 
habitual; the men are economized by it; the 
continual loss by partial and frequently 
useless combats is avoided, as well as the 
considerable expenses of hospitals to govern- 
ment."— II. 410, 411. 

We have room for no more extracts: 
those which have been already given will 
convey a clear idea of the character of this 
work. It possesses the merits, and exhibits 
the defects, of all the memoirs by the leaders 
of the ambitious or war party in France, re- 
garding that period. Abounding in anecdote, 
full of patriotic spirit and military adventure, 
it at the same time presents all the prejudices 
and errors of that party, — a profound and 
unreasonable hatred of this country — an im- 
passioned enthusiasm for the glory of France 
— a deliberate and apparently sincere belief, 
that whatever opposes its elevation is to be 
looked upon with instinctive and unconquer- 
able aversion. In this respect, the opinions 
of this party in France are utterly extravagant, 
and not a little amusing. They make no 
allowances for the differences of national 
feeling — yield nothing to national rivalry — 
never transport themselves into the breasts of 
their antagonists in the strife, or of the people 
they are oppressing, but take for granted, as a 
matter concerning which there can be no dis- 
pute, that whatever resists the glory of France 
is an enemy of the human race. There are 
many writers of intelligence and ability in 
whom we cannot pardon this weakness ; but, 
recollecting the tragic fate of Marshal Ney, 
and pitying the ulcerated hearts of his rela- 
tions, we find more excuse for it in his bio- 
grapher, and look forward with interest to the 
concluding volumes of this work, which will 
contain still more interesting matter — the 
Peninsular campaigns, the Russian retreat, 
the rout of Waterloo. 



94 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



ROBERT BRUCE.* 

A Freedome is a noble thing; 
Freedome makes man to have liking; 
Freedome all solace to men gives; 
He lives at ease that freely lives. 

Barbour's Bruce. 



The discovery of the bones of Robert 
Bruce, among the ruins of Dunfermline ab- 
bey, calls for some observations in a journal 
intended to record the most remarkable events, 
whether of a public or a domestic nature, 
which occur during the period to which it 
refers ; and it will never, perhaps, be our 
good fortune to direct the attention of our 
readers to an event more interesting to the 
antiquary or the patriot of Scotland, than the 
discovery and reinterment of the remains of 
her greatest hero. 

It is satisfactory, in the first place, to know 
that no doubt can exist about the remains 
which were discovered being really the bones 
of Robert Bruce. Historians had recorded 
that he was interred " debito cum honore in 
medio Ecclesice de Dunfermline ;" but the 
ruin of the abbey at the time of the Reforma- 
tion, and the subsequent neglect of the monu- 
ments which it contained, had rendered it 
difficult to ascertain where this central spot 
really was. Attempts had been made to ex- 
plore among the ruins for the tomb ; but so 
entirely was the form of cathedral churches 
forgotten in this northern part of the island, 
that the researches were made in a totally 
different place from the centre of the edifice. 
At length, in digging the foundations of the 
new church, the workmen came to a tomb, 
arched over with masonry, and bearing the 
marks of more than usual care in its construc- 
tion. Curiosity being attracted by this cir- 
cumstance, it was suspected that it might 
contain the remains of the illustrious hero ; 
and persons of more skill having examined 
the spot discovered that it stood precisely in the 
centre of the church, as its form was indicated 
by the existing ruins. The tomb having been 
opened in the presence of the Barons of 
Exchequer, the discovery of the name of King 
Robert on an iron plate among the rubbish, 
and the cloth of gold in which the bones were 
shrouded, left no room to doubt that the long 
wished-for grave had at last been discovered ; 
while Ihe appearance of the skeleton, in 
which the breast-bone was sawed asunder, 
afforded a still more interesting proof of its 
really being the remains of that illustrious 
hero, whose heart was committed to his faith- 
ful associate in arms, and thrown by him, on a 
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, amidst the ranks 
of the enemy, with the sublime expression, 
" Onwards, as thou wast wont, thou fearless 
heart." 

Such an event demands a temporary pause 
in the avocations and amusements of life. 
We feel called on to go back, in imagination, 

♦ Blackwood's Magazine, Dec. 1819. Written at 
khe time of the discovery of the remains of Robert 
Bruce in the church of Dunfermline. 



to the distant and barbarous period when the 
independence of our country was secured by 
a valour and ability that has never since 
been equalled ; and in returning from his 
recent grave to take a nearer view of the 
difficulties which he had to encounter, and the 
beneficial effects which his unshaken patriot- 
ism has confirmed upon its people. — Had we 
lived in the period when his heroic achieve- 
ments were fresh in the public recollection, 
and when the arms of England yet trembled 
at the name of Bannockburn, we would have 
dwelt with enthusiasm on his glorious ex- 
ploits. A nation's gratitude should not relax, 
when the lapse of five subsequent centuries 
has not produced a rival to his patriotism and 
valour ; and when this long period has served 
only to develope the blessings which they 
have conferred upon his country. 

Towards a due understanding, however, of 
the extraordinary merits of Robert Bruce, it 
is necessary to take a cursory view of the 
power with which he had to contend, and of 
the resources of that kingdom, which, at that 
critical juncture, providence committed to his 
arms. 

The power of England, against which it 
was his lot incessantly to struggle, was, per- 
haps, the most formidable which then existed 
in Europe. The native valour of her people, 
distinguished even under the weakest reign, 
was then led on and animated by a numerous 
and valiant feudal nobility. That bold and 
romantic spirit of enterprise which led the 
Norman arms to the throne of England, and 
enabled Roger de Hauteville, with thirty fol- 
lowers, to win the crown of the two Sicilies, 
still animated the English nobles; and to this 
hereditary spirit was added the remembrance 
of the matchless glories which their arms had 
acquired in the wars of Palestine. The 
barons, who were arrayed against Robert 
Bruce, were the descendants of those iron 
warriors who combated for Christendom under 
the wall of Acre, and defeated the whole 
Saracen strength in the battle of Ascalon ; the 
banners that were unfurled for the conquest 
of Scotland, were those which had waved 
victorious over the arms of Saladin ; and the 
sovereign who led them, bore the crown 
that had been worn by Richard in the Holy 
Wars, and wielded in his sword the terror of 
that mighty name, at which even the accumu- 
lated hosts of Asia were appalled. 

Nor were the resources of England less 
formidable for maintaining and nourishing 
the war. The prosperity which had grown 
up with the equal laws of our Saxon ances- 
tors, and which the tyranny of the early Nor- 
man kings had never completely extinguished, 
had revived and spread under the wise and 



ROBERT BRUCE. 



95 



beneficent reigns of Henry II. and Edward I. 
The legislative wisdom of the last monarch 
had given to the English law greater improve- 
ments than it had ever received in any subse- 
quent reigns, while his heroic valour had 
subdued the rebellious spirit of his barons, 
and trained their united strength to submis- 
sion to the throne. The acquisition of Wales 
had removed the only weak point of his wide 
dominion, and added a cruel and savage race 
to the already formidable mass of his armies. 
The navy of England already ruled the seas, 
and was prepared to carry ravage and desola- 
tion over the wide and defenceless Scottish 
coast; while a hundred thousand men, armed 
in the magnificent array of feudal war, and 
led on by the ambition of a feudal nobility, 
poured into a country which seemed destined 
only to be their prey. 

But most of all, in the ranks of this arm)', 
were found the intrepid Yeomanry of Eng- 
land ; that peculiar and valuable body of men 
which has in every age contributed as much 
to the stability of the English character, as 
the celebrity of the English arms, and which 
then composed those terrible archers, whose 
prowess rendered them so formidable to all 
the armies of Europe. These men, whose 
valour was warmed by the consciousness of 
personal freedom, and whose strength was 
nursed among the enclosed fields and green 
pastures of English liberty, conferred, till the 
discovery of fire-arms rendered personal ac- 
quirements of no avail, a matchless advan- 
tage on the English armies. The troops of 
no other nation could produce a body of men 
in the least comparable to them either in 
strength, discipline, or individual valour; and 
such was the dreadful efficacy with which 
they used their weapons, that not only did 
they mainly contribute to the subsequent tri- 
umphs of Cressy and Azincour, but at Poitiers 
and Hamildon Hill they alone gained the vic- 
tory, with hardly any assistance from the 
feudal tenantry. 

These troops were well known to the 
Scottish soldiers, and had established their 
superiority over them in many bloody battles, 
in which the utmost efforts of undisciplined 
valour had been found unavailing against 
their practised discipline and superior equip- 
ment. The very names of the barons who 
headed them were associated with an un- 
broken career of conquest and renown, and 
can hardly be read yet without a feeling of 
national exultation. 

Names that to fear were never known, 
Bold Norfolk's Earl de Brotherton, 
And Oxford's famed de Vere ; 
Ross, Montague, and Manly came. 
And Courtney's pride, and Percy's fame, 
Names known too well in Scotland's war 
At Falkirk, Methven, and Dunbar, 
Blazed broader yet in after years, 
At Cressy red, and fell Poitiers. 

Against this terrible force, before which, in 
the succeeding reign, the military power of 
France was compelled to bow, Bruce had to 
array the scanty troops of a barren land, and 
the divided forces of a turbulent nobility. 
Scotland was, in his time, fallen low indeed 
from that state of peace and prosperity in 



which she was found at the first invasion of 
Edward I., and on which so much light has 
been thrown by the industrious research of 
our times.* The disputed succession had 
sown the seeds of unextinguishable jealousies 
among the nobles; the gold of England had 
corrupted many to betray their country's 
cause; and the iatal ravages of English inva- 
sion nact desolated the whole plains from 
which resources for carrying on the war 
could be drawn. All the heroic valour, the 
devoted patriotism, and the personal prowess 
of Wallace, had been unable to stem the 
torrent of English invasion ; and, when he 
died, the whole nation seemed to sink under 
the load against which his unexampled forti- 
tude had long enabled it to struggle. These 
unhappy jealousies among the nobles, to 
which his downfall was owing, still continued, 
and almost rendered hopeless any attempt to 
combine their forces; while the thinned popu- 
lation and ruined husbandry of the country 
seemed to prognosticate nothing but utter 
extirpation from a continuance of the war. 
Nor was the prospect less melancholy from a 
consideration of the combats which had taken 
place. The short spear and light shield of 
the Scotch had been found utterly unavailing 
against the iron panoply and powerful horses 
of the English barons ; while the hardy and 
courageous mountaineers perished in vain 
under the dreadful tempest of the English 
archery. 

What then must have been the courage of 
that youthful prince, who after having been 
driven for shelter to an island on the north of 
Ireland, could venture, with only forty fol- 
lowers, to raise the standard of independence 
in the west of Scotland, against the accumu- 
lated force of this mighty power ? — what the 
resources of that understanding, which, though 
intimately acquainted, from personal service, 
with the tried superiority of the English arms, 
could foresee, in his barren and exhausted 
country, the means of combating them 1 — what 
the ability of that political conduct which 
could re-unite the jaring interests, and smother 
the deadly feuds, of the Scottish nobles 1 — and 
what the capacity of that noble warrior, who, 
in the words of the contemporary historian,f 
could " unite the prowess of the first knight to 
the conduct of the greatest general of his age," 
and was able, in the space of six years, to raise 
the Scottish arms from the lowest point of 
depression to such a pitch of glory, that even 
the redoubted archers and haughty chivalry 
of England fled at the sight of the Scottish 
banner? i 

Nor was it only in the field that the great 
and patriotic conduct of Robert Bruce was dis- 
played. In the endeavour to restore the almost 
ruined fortunes of his country, and to heal the 
wounds which a war of unparalleled severity 
had brought unon its people, he exhibited the 
same wise and beneficent policy. Under his 
auspicious rule, husbandry revived, arts were 
encouraged, and the turbulent barons were 
awed into subjection. Scotland recovered, 
during his administration, in a great measure, 



♦ Chalmers's Caledonia, vol. i. JFroissart. 
t Walsing. p. 106. Mon. Malms, p. 152, 153. 



96 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



from the devastation that had preceeded it; 
and the peasants, forgetting the stem warrior 
in the beneficent monarch, long remembered 
his sway, under the name of the " good King 
Robert's reign." 

But the greatness of his character appeared 
most of all from the events that occurred after 
his death. When the capacity with which 
he and his worthy associates, Randolph and 
Douglas, had counterbalanced the superiority 
of the English arms, was withdrawn, the fabric 
which they had supported fell to the ground. 
In the very first battle which was fought after 
his death, at Hamildon Hill, a larger army 
than that which conquered at Bannockburn 
was overthrown by the archers of England, 
without a single knight couching his spear. 
Never, at any subsequent period, was Scotland 
able to withstand the more powerful arms of 
the English yeomanry. Thenceforward, her 
military history is little more than a melancholy 
catalogue of continued defeats, occasioned 
rather by treachery on the part of her nobles, 
or incapacity in her generals, than any defect 
of valour in her soldiers ; and the independence 
of the monarchy was maintained rather by the 
terror which the name of Bruce and the re- 
membrance of Bannockburn had inspired, 
than by the achievements of any of the suc- 
cessors to his throne.* 

The merits of Roben Bruce, as a warrior, 
ire very generally acknowledged; and the eyes 
of Scottish patriotism turn with the greater 
:xultaticn to his triumphs, from the contrast 
which their splendour affords to the barren 
and humiliating annals of the subsequent 
reigns. But the important conseq.ue>;ces of 
nis victories are not sufficiently appreciated. 
While all admit the purity of the motives by 
which he was actuated, there are many who 
lament the consequences of his success, and 
perceive in it the source of those continued 
hostilities between England and Scotland 
which have brought such incalculable calami- 
ties upon both countries, and from which the 
latter has only within half a century begun to 
recover. Better would it have been, it is said 
for the prosperity of this country, if, like Wales, 
she had passed at once under the dominion of 
the English government, and received, five 
centuries ago, the present of that liberty which 
she so entirely lost during her struggles for 
national independence, and which nothing but 
her subsequent union with a free people has 
enabled her to obtain. 

There is something, we think, a priori, im- 
probable in this supposition, that, from the 
assertion of her independence under Robert 
Bruce, Scotland has received any injury. The 
instinct to maintain the national independence, 
and resist aggression from foreign powers, is 
so universally implanted among mankind, that 
it may well be doubted whether an obedience 
to its impulse is likely in any case to pro- 
duce injurious effects. In fact, subjugation 
by a foreign power is itself, in general, a greater 
calamity than any benefits with which it is 
accompanied can ever compensate; because, 
in the very act of receiving them by force, there 



♦ Henry's Britain, vol. vii. 



is implied an entire dereliction of all that is 
valuable in political blessings, — a security that 
they will remain permanent. There is no ex- 
ample, perhaps, to be found in the history of 
mankind, of political freedom being either 
effectually conferred by a sovereign in gift, or 
communicated by the force of foreign arms ; 
but as liberty is the greatest blessing which 
man can enjoy, so it seems to be the law of 
nature that it should be the reward of intre- 
pidity and energy alone ; and that it is by the 
labour of his hands, and the sweat of his brow, 
that he is to earn his freedom as well as his 
subsistence. 

Least of all are such advantages to be an- 
ticipated from the conquest of a free people. 
That the dominion of free states over con- 
quered countries is always more tyrannical 
than that of any other form of government, 
has been observed ever since the birth of 
liberty in the Grecian states, by all who have 
been so unfortunate as to be subjected to their 
rule. If we except the Roman republic, whose 
wise and beneficent policy is so entirely at 
variance with every thing else which we ob- 
serve in human affairs, that we are almost dis- 
posed to impute it to a special interposition of 
divine providence, there is no free state in 
ancient or modern times, whose government 
towards the countries whom it subdued has 
not been of the most oppressive description. 
We are accustomed to speak of the maternal 
government of free governments, but towards 
their subject provinces, it is generally the 
cruel tyranny of the step-mother, who oppresses 
her acquired children to favour her own off- 
spring. 

Nor is it difficult to perceive the reason 
why a popular government is naturally in- 
clined, in the general case, to severity towards 
its dependencies. A single monarch looks to 
the revenue alone of the countries whom he 
has subdued, and as it necessarily rises with 
the prosperity which they enjoy, his obvious 
interest is to pursne the measures best calcu- 
lated to secure it. But in republics, or in those 
free governments where the popular voice ex- 
ercises a decided control, the leading men of 
the state themselves look to the property of 
the subject country as the means of their in- 
dividual exaltation. Confiscations according- 
ly are multiplied, with a view to gratify the 
people or nobles of the victorious country 
with grants of the confiscated lands. Hatred 
and animosity are thus engendered between 
the ruling government and their subject 
provinces; and this, in its time, gives rise to 
new confiscations, by which the breach be- 
tween the higher and lower orders is rendered 
irreparable. Whoever is acquainted with the 
history of the dominion which the Athenian 
and Sy racusan populace held over their subject 
cities ; with the government of Genoa, Venice, 
and Florence, in modern times ; or with the 
sanguinary rule which England exercised 
over Ireland during the three centuries which 
followed her subjugation, will know that this 
statement is not overcharged. 

On principle, therefore, and judging by the 
experience of past times, there is no room to 
doubt, that Bruce, in opposing the conquest of 



EOBERT BRUCE. 



97 



Scotland by the English arms, doing what the 
real interest of his country required ; and that 
how incalculable soever may be the blessings 
which she has since received by a union, on 
equal terms, with her southern neighbour, the 
result would have been very different had she 
entered into that government on the footing of 
involuntary subjugation. In fact, it is not diffi- 
cult to perceive what would have been the 
policy which England would have pursued to- 
wards this country, had she prevailed in the 
contest for the Scottish throne ; and it is by 
following out the consequences of such an 
event, and tracing its probable influence on 
the condition of our population at this day, 
that we can alone appreciate the immense obli- 
gations we owe to our forefathers, who fought 
and died on the field of Bannockburn. 

Had the English then prevailed in the war 
with Robert Bruce, and finally succeeded in 
establishing their long wished-for dominion in 
this country, it cannot be doubted, that their 
first measure would have been to dispossess a 
large portion of the nobles who had so obsti- 
nately maintained the war against them, and 
substitute their own barons in their room. The 
pretended rebellion of Scotland against the 
legitimate authority of Edward, would have 
furnished a plausible pretext for such a pro- 
ceeding, while policy would of course have 
suggested it as the most efficacious means, both 
of restraining the turbulent and hostile spirit 
of the natives, and of gratifying the great barons 
by whose force they had been subdued. In 
fact, many such confiscations and grants of 
the lands to English nobles actually took place, 
during the time that Edward I. maintained his 
authority within the Scottish territory. 

The consequences of such a measure are 
very obvious. The dispossessed proprietors 
would have nourished the most violent and 
inveterate animosity against their oppressors ; 
and the tenantry on their estates, attached by 
feudal and clanish affection to their ancient 
masters, would have joined in any scheme for 
their restoration. The seeds of continual dis- 
cord and hatred would thus have been sown 
between the lower orders and the existing 
proprietors of the soil. On the other hand, 
the great English barons, to whom the con- 
fiscated lands were assigned, would naturally 
prefer the society of their own country, and the 
security of their native castles, to the unpro- 
ductive soil and barbarous tribes on their 
northern estates. They would in consequence 
have relinquished these estates to factors or 
agents, and, without ever thinking of residing 
among a people by whom they were detested, 
have sought only to increase, by rigorous ex- 
actions, the revenue which they could derive 
from their labour. 

In progress of time, however, the natural 
fervour of the Scottish people, their hereditary 
animosities against England, the exertions of 
the dispossessed proprietors, and the oppression 
of the English authorities, would have occa- 
sioned a revolt in Scotland. They would na- 
turally have chosen for such an undertaking 
the moment when the English forces were en- 
gaged in the wars of France, and when the 
entire desertion of the nothern frontier pro- 
13 



mised successful rapine to their arms. In such 
circumstances, it is not to be doubted that they 
would have been unable to withstand the seeds 
of resistance to the English arms, which the 
French emissaries would have sedulously 
spread through the country. And if the au- 
thority of England was again re-established, 
new and more extensive confiscations would 
of course have followed; the English nobles 
would have been gratified by grants of the most 
considerable estates on the north of the Tweed, 
and the bonds of military subjection would 
have been tightened on the unfortunate people 
who were subdued. 

The continuance of the wars between France 
and England, by presenting favourable op- 
portunities to the Scotch to revolt, combined 
with the temptation which the remoteness of 
their situation and the strength of their coun- 
try afforded, would have induced continual 
civil wars between the peasantry and their 
foreign masters, until the resources of the coun- 
try were entirely exhausted, and the people 
sunk in hopeless submission under the power 
that oppressed them. 

But in the progress of these wars, an evil 
of a far greater and more permanent descrip- 
tion would naturally arise, than either the loss 
of lives or the devastation of property which 
they occasioned. In the course of the pro- 
tracted contest, the landed property of the 

COUNTRY WOULD ENTIRELY HAVE CHANGED MAS- 
TERS ; and in place of being possessed by na- 
tives of the country permanently settled on 
their estates, and attached by habit and com- 
mon interest to the labourers of the ground, 
it would have come into the hands of foreign 
noblemen, forced upon the country by military 
power, hated by the natives, residing always 
on their English estates, and regarding the 
people of Scotland as barbarians, whom it was 
alike impolitic to approach, and necessary to 
curb by despotic power. 

But while such would be the feelings and 
policy of the English proprietors, the stewards 
whom they appointed to manage their Scotch 
estates, at a distance from home, and surround- 
ed by a fierce and hostile population, would 
have felt the necessity of some assistance, to 
enable them to maintain their authority, or 
turn to any account the estates that were com- 
mitted to their care. Unable to procure mili- 
tary assistance, to enforce the submission of 
every district, or collect the rents of every pro- 
perty, they would, of necessity, have looked to 
some method of conciliating the people of the 
country ; and such a method would naturally 
suggest itself in the attachment which the peo- 
ple bore to the families of original landlords, and 
the consequent means which they possessed 
of swaying their refractory dispositions. These 
unhappy men, on the other hand, despairing 
of the recovery of their whole estates, would 
be glad of an opportunity of regaining any pai t 
of them, and eagerly embrace any proposal by 
which such a compromise might be effected. 
The sense of mutal dependence, in short, would 
have led to an arrangement, by which the es- 
tates of the English nobles were to be subset to 
the Scottish proprietors for a fixed yearly rent, and 
they would take upon themselves the task to 



98 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



which they alone were competent, of recovering 
the rents from the actual cultivators of the soil. 

As the numbers of the people increased, 
however, and the value of the immense farms 
which had been thus granted to the descendants 
of their original proprietors was enhanced, the 
task of collecting rents over so extensive a 
district would have become too great for any 
individual, and the increased wealth which he 
had acquired from the growth of his tenantry, 
would have led him to dislike the personal la- 
bour with which it would be attended. These 
great tenants, in consequence, would have sub- 
set their vast possessions to an inferior set of 
occupiers, who might each superintend the 
collection of the rents within his own farm, 
and have an opportunity of acquiring a per- 
sonal acquaintance with the labourers by whom 
it was to be cultivated. As the number of the 
people increased, the same process would be 
repeated by the different tenants on their re- 
spective farms; and thus there would have 
sprung up universally in Scotland a class of 
middle men between the proprietor and the ac- 
tual cultivator of the soil. 

While these changes went on, the condition 
of the people, oppressed by a series of suc- 
cessive masters, each of whom required to live 
by their labour, and wholly debarred from ob- 
taining any legal redress for their grievances, 
would have gradually sunk. Struggling with 
a barren soil, and a host of insatiable oppres- 
sors, they could never have acquired an}' ideas 
of comfort, or indulged in any hopes of rising 
in the world. They would, in consequence, 
have adopted that species of food which pro- 
mised to afford the greatest nourishment for a 
family from the smallest space of ground ; and 
from the universality of this cause, the Potato 
would have become the staple food of the 
country. 

The landed proprietors, on the other hand, 
who are the natural protectors, and ought al- 
ways to be the best encouragers of the people 
on their estates, would have shrunk from the 
idea of leaving their English possessions, 
where they were surrounded by an affectionate 
and comfortable tenantry, where riches and 
plenty sprung from the natural fertility of the 
soil, and where power and security were de- 
rived from their equal law, to settle in a north- 
ern climate, amongst a people by whom they 
were abhorred, and where law was unable to 
restrain the licentiousness, or reform the bar- 
barity of the inhabitants. — They would in con- 
sequence have universally become absentee 
proprietors; and not only denied to the Scot- 
tish people the incalculable advantages of a 
resident body of landed gentlemen ; but, by 
their influence in Parliament, and their animo- 
sity towards their northern tenantry, prevented 
any legislative measure being pursued for 
their relief. 

In such circumstances, it seems hardly con- 
ceivable that arts or manufactures should have 
made any progress in this country. But, if in 
spite of the obstacles which the unfavourable 
climate, and unhappy political circumstances 
of the country presented, manufactures should 
have begun to spring up amongst us, they 
would speedily have been checked by the com- 



mercial jealousy of their more powerful south- 
ern rivals. Bills would have been brought 
into parliament, as was actually done in re- 
gard to a neighbouring island, proceeding 
on the preamble, " that it is expedient that 
the Scottish manufactures should be discou- 
raged ;" and the prohibition of sending their 
goods into the richer market of England, 
whither the whole wealth of the country were 
already drawn, would have annihilated the in- 
fant efforts of manufacturing industry. 

Nor would the Reformation, which, as mat- 
ters stand, has been of such essential service 
to this country, have been, on the hypothesis 
which we are pursuing, a lesser source of suf- 
fering, or a greater bar to the improvement 
of the people. From being embraced by their 
English landlords, the Reformed Religion 
would have been hateful to the peasants of 
Scotland ; the Catholic priests would have 
sought refuge among them, from the persecu- 
tion to which they were exposed in their native 
seats ; and both would have been strengthened 
in their hatred to those persons to whom their 
common misfortune was owing. Religious 
hatred would thus have combined with all the 
previous circumstances of irritation, to in- 
crease the rancour between the proprietors 
of the soil, and the labouring classes in this 
country; and from the circumstance of the 
latter adhering to the proscribed religion, they 
would have been rendered yet more incapable 
of procuring a redress for their grievances in 
a legislative form. 

Had the English, therefore, succeeded in 
subduing Scotland in the time of Robert 
Bruce, and in maintaining their authority 
from that period, we think it not going too far 
to assert, that the people of this country would 
have been now in an unhappy and distracted 
condition : that religious discussion and civil 
rancour would have mutually exasperated the 
higher and lower orders against each other ; 
that the landed proprietors would have been 
permanently settled in the victorious country; 
that everywhere a class of middlemen would 
have been established to grind and ruin the 
labours of the poor; that manufactures would 
have been scanty, and the country covered 
with a numerous and indigent population, 
idle in their habits, ignorant in their ideas, 
ferocious in their manners, professing a reli- 
gion which held them in bondage, and cling- 
ing to prejudices from which their ruin must 
ensue. 

Is it said, that this is mere conjecture, and 
that nothing in the history of English govern- 
ment warrants us in concluding, that such 
would have been the consequence of the esta- 
blishment of their dominion in this country ! 
Alas ! it is not conjecture. The history of Ire- 
land affords too melancholy a confirmation 
of the truth of the positions which we have 
advanced, and of the reality of the deduction 
which we have pursued. In that deduction 
we have not reasoned on hypothesis or con- 
jecture. Every step which we have hinted at, 
has there been taken ; every consequence which 
we have suggested, has there ensued. Those 
acquainted with the history of that unhappy 
country, or who have studied its present con- 



ROBERT BRUCE. 



99 



dition, will recognise in the conjectural history 
which we have sketched, of what would have 
followed the annexation of this country to 
England in the time of Edward II., the real 
history of what has followed its subjugation 
in the time of Henry II., and perceive in the 
causes which we have pointed out, as what 
would have operated upon our people, the 
real causes of the misery and wretchedness in 
which its population is involved. 

Nor is the example of the peaceful submis- 
sion of Wales to the dominion of England, 
any authority against this view of the subject. 
Wales is so inconsiderable in comparison to 
England, it comes so completely in contact 
with its richest provinces, and is so enveloped 
by its power, that when once subdued, all 
thought of resistance or revolt became hope- 
less. That mountainous region, therefore, fell 
as quietly and as completely into the arms of 
England, as if it had been one of the Hept- 
archy, which in process of time was incor- 
porated with the English monarchy. Very 
different is the situation of Scotland, where 
the comparative size of the country, the fervid 
spirit of the inhabitants, the remoteness of its 
situation, and the strength of its mountains, 
continually must have suggested the hope of 
successful revolt, and as necessarily occa- 
sioned the calamitous consequences which we 
have detailed. The rebellion of Owen Glen- 
dower is sufficient to convince us, that nothing 
but the utter insignificance of Wales, compared 
to England, prevented the continual revolt of 
the Welsh people, and the consequent intro- 
duction of all those horrors which have fol- 
lowed the establishment of English dominion 
among the inhabitants of Ireland. 

Do we then rejoice in the prosperity of our 
country 1 Do we exult at the celebrity which 
it has acquired in arts and in arms! Do we 
duly estimate the blessings which it has long 
enjoyed from equal law and personal freedom? 
— Do we feel grateful for the intelligence, the 
virtue, and the frugality of our peasantry, and 
acknowledge, with thankfulness, the practical 
beneficence and energetic spirit of our landed 
proprietors 1 Let us turn to the grave of Ro- 
bert Bruce, and feel as we ought the inex- 
pressible gratitude due to him as the remote 
author of all these blessings. But for his bold 
and unconquerable spirit, Scotland might have 
shared with Ireland the severity of English 
conquest; and, instead of exulting now in the 
prosperity of our country, the energy of our 
peasantry, and the patriotic spirit of our resi- 
dent landed proprietors, we might have been 
deploring with her an absent nobility, an 
oppressive tenantry, a bigotted and ruined 
people. 



It was therefore, in truth, a memorable day 
for this country when the remains of this 
great prince were rediscovered amidst the 
ruins in which they had so long been hid; 
when the arms which slew Henry de Bohun 
were reinterred in the land which they had 
saved from slavery ; and the head which had 
beheld the triumph of Bannockburn was con- 
signed to the dust, after five centuries of grate- 
ful remembrance and experienced obligation. 
It is by thus appreciating the merits of depart- 
ed worth, that similar virtues in future are to 
be called forth ; and by duly feeling the conse- 
quences of heroic resistance in time past, that 
the spirit is to be excited by which the future 
fortunes of the state are to be maintained. 

In these observations we have no intention, 
as truly we have no desire, to depreciate the 
incalculable blessings which this country has 
derived from her union with England. We 
feel, as strongly as any can do, the immense 
advantage which this measure brought to the 
wealth, the industry, and the spirit of Scotland. 
We are proud to acknowledge, that it is to the 
efforts of English patriotism that we owe the 
establishment of liberty in our civil code ; and 
to the influence of English example, the diffu- 
sion of a free spirit among our people. But it 
is just because we are duly impressed with 
these feelings that we recur, with such grate- 
ful pride, to the patriotic resistance of Robert 
Bruce; it is because we feel that we should 
be unworthy of sharing in English liberty, un- 
less we had struggled for our own indepen- 
dence, and incapable of participating in its 
benefits, unless we had shown that we were 
capable of acquiring it. Nor are we ashamed 
to own, that it is the spirit which English free- 
dom has awakened that first enabled us fully 
to appreciate the importance of the efforts 
which our ancestors made in resisting their 
dominion ; and that but for the Union on equal 
terms with that power, we would have been 
ignorant of the debt which we owed to those 
who saved us from its subjugation. In our 
national fondness, therefore, for the memory 
of Robert Bruce, the English should perceive 
the growth of those principles from which 
their own unequalled greatness has arisen ; 
nor should they envy the glory of the field of 
Bannockburn, when we appeal to it as our 
best title to be quartered in their arms. 

Yet mourn not, land of Fame, 
Though ne'er the leopards on thy shield 
Retreated from so sad a field 

Since Norman William came. 
Oft may thine annals justly boast, 
Of battles there by Scotland lost, 

Grudge not her victory; 
When for her freeborn rights she strove, 
Rishts dear to all who freedom love, 

To none bo dear as ihpe. 



100 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



PARIS IN 1814/ 



With whatever sentiments a stranger may 
enter Paris, his feelings must be the same 
with regard to the monuments of ancient mag- 
nificence, or of modern taste, which it contains. 
All that the vanity or patriotism of a long 
series of sovereigns could eifect for the em- 
bellishment of the capital in which they 
resided ; all that the conquests of an ambitious 
and unprincipled army could accumulate from 
the spoils of the nations whom they had sub- 
dued, are there presented to the eye of the 
stranger with a profusion which obliterates 
eyery former prejudice, and stifles the feelings 
of national emulation in exultation at the 
greatness of human genius. 

The ordinary buildings of Paris, as every 
traveller has observed, and as all the world 
knows, are in general mean and uncomfort- 
able. The height and gloomy aspect of the 
houses; the narrowness of the streets, and the 
want of pavement for foot passengers, convey 
an idea of antiquity, which ill accords with 
what the imagination had anticipated of the 
modern capital of the French empire. This 
circumstance renders the admiration of the 
spectator greater when he first comes in sight 
of its public edifices : when he is conducted to 
the Place Louis Quinze or the Pont Neuf, 
from whence he has a general view of the 
principal buildings of this celebrated capital. 
With the single exception of the view of Lon- 
don from the terrace of the Adelphi, there is 
no point in Britain where the effect of archi- 
tectural design is so great as in the situations 
which have now been mentioned. The view 
from the former of these, combines many of 
the most striking objects which Paris has to 
present. To the east, the long front of the 
Tuileries rises over the dark mass of foliage 
which cover its gardens ; to the south, the 
picturesque aspect of the town is broken by 
the varied objects which the river presents, 
and the fine perspective of the Bridge of Peace, 
terminating in the noble front of the palace of 
the Legislative Body; to the west, the long 
avenues of the Elysian Fields are closed by 
the pillars of a triumphal arch which Napo- 
leon had commenced ; while, to the north, the 
beautiful facade of the Place itself, leaves the 
spectator only room to discover at a greater 
distance the foundation of the Temple of 
Glory, which he had commenced, and in the 
execution of which he was interrupted by 
those ambitious enterprises to which his sub- 
sequent downfall was owing.f To a painter's 



* Written in May and June, 1814, during a residence 
at Paris, when the allied armies occupied the city, and 
the great musetim of the Louvre was untouched; and 
published in ''Travels in France in 1814 — 15," which 
issued from the press in Edinburgh in 1815, to the 
first volume of which the author contributed a few 
chapters. 

•)- Since completed, and forming the beautiful peristyle 
of the Madeleine. 



eye, the effect of the whole scene is increased 
by the rich and varied fore-ground, which 
everywhere presents itself, composed of the 
shrubs with which the skirts of the square are 
adorned, and the lofty poplars which rise 
amidst the splendour of" architectural beauty : 
while recent events give a greater interest to 
the spot from which this beauty is surveyed, 
by the remembrance, that it was here that 
Louis XVI. fell a martyr to the revolutionary 
principles, and that it was here that the Em- 
peror Alexander and the other princes of 
Europe took their station when their armies 
passed in triumph through the walls of Paris. 

The view from the Pont Neuf, though not 
striking upon the whole, embraces objects of 
greater individual beauty. The gay and ani- 
mated quays of the city covered with foot pas- 
sengers, and, with all the varied exhibitions of 
industrious occupation, which, from the warm- 
ness of the climate, are carried on in the open 
air ; — the long and splendid front of the Louvre, 
and the Tuileries ; — the bold projections of 
the Palais des Arts, of the Hotel de la Monnaie, 
and other public buildings on the opposite side 
of the river; — the beautiful perspective of the 
bridges, adorned by the magnificent colonnade 
which fronts the Palace of the Legislative 
Body; — and the lofty picturesque buildings of 
the centre of Paris, surrounding the more ele- 
vated towers of Notre Dame, form a scene, 
which, though less perfect, is more striking, 
and more characteristic than the scene from 
the centre of the Place Louis Quinze. It con- 
veys at once a general idea of the French 
capital ; of that mixture of poverty and splen- 
dour by which it is so remarkably distinguish- 
ed; of that grandeur of national power, and 
that degradation of individual importance 
which marked the ancient dynasty of the 
French nation. It marks too, in an historical 
view, the changes of public feeling which the 
people of this country have undergone, from 
the distant period when the towers of Notre 
Dame rose amidst the austerity of Gothic taste, 
and were loaded with the riches of Catholic 
superstition, to that boasted aera, when the 
loyalty of the French people exhausted the 
wealth and the genius of the country, to deco- 
rate with classic taste the residence of their 
sovereigns ; and lastly, to those later days, 
when the names of religion and of loyalty have 
alike been forgotten ; when the national exulta- 
tion reposed only on the trophies of military 
greatness, and the iron yoke of imperial power 
was forgotten in the monuments which record 
the deeds of imperial glory. 

To the general observation on the inferiority 
of the common buildings in Paris, there are 
some remarkable exceptions. The Boulevards, 
which are the remains of the ancient ramparts 
which surrounded the city at a former period, 
are, in general, beautiful, both from the circu- 



PARIS IN 1814. 



101 



lar form in which they are built, which pre- 
vents the view from being ever too extensive 
for the objects which it contains, and presents 
them in the most picturesque aspect ; from the 
breadth which they everywhere preserve, and 
which affords room for the spectator to observe 
the magnificence of the detached palaces with 
which they abound; and from the rows of trees 
with which they are shaded, and which com- 
bine singularly well with the irregular cha- 
racter of the building which the}' generally 
present. In the skirts of the town, and more 
especially in the Fauxbourg St. Germain, the 
beauty of the streets is greatly increased by 
the detached hotels or villas, surrounded by 
gardens, which are everywhere to be met with, 
in which the lilac, the laburnum, the Bois de 
Judee, and the acacia, grow in the most luxu- 
riant manner, and on the green foliage of 
which, the eye reposes with singular delight, 
amidst the bright and dazzling whiteness of 
the stone with which they are surrounded. 

The Hotel des Invalides, the Chelsea Hospital 
of France, is one of the objects on which the 
Parisians principally pride themselves, and to 
which a stranger is conducted immediately 
after his arrival in that capital. The institu- 
tion itself appears to be well conducted, and 
to give general satisfaction to the wounded 
men, who have there found an asylum from 
the miseries of war. These men live in habits 
of perfect harmony among each other; a state 
of things widely different from that of our 
veterans in Greenwich Hospital, and which is 
probably chiefly owing to the cheerfulness and 
equanimity of temper which form the best 
feature in the French character. There is 
something in the style of the architecture of 
this building, which accords well with the 
object to which it is devoted. The front is 
distinguished by a simple manly portico, and a 
dome of the finest proportion rises above its 
centre, which is visible from all parts of the 
city. This dome was gilded by order of Bona- 
parte : and however much a fastidious taste 
may regret the addition, it certainly gave an 
air of splendour to the whole, which was in 
perfect unison with the feelings of exultation 
which the sight of this monument of military 
glory" was then fitted to awaken arapng the 
French people. The exterior of this edifice 
was formerly surrounded by cannon captured 
by the armies of France at different periods: 
and ten thousand standards, the trophies of 
victory during the wars of two centuries, 
waved under its splendid dome, and enveloped 
the sword of Frederic the Great, which hung 
from the centre, until the 31st of March, 1814, 
when they were all burnt by order of Maria 
Louisa, to prevent their falling into the vic- 
torious hands of the allied powers. 

If the character of the architecture of the 
Hotel des Invalides accords well with the 
object to which that building is destined; the 
character of the Louvre is not less in unison 
with the spirit of the fine arts, to which it is 
consecrated. It is impossible for language to 
convey any adequate idea of the impression 
which this exquisite building awakens in the 
mind of a stranger. The beautiful proportions, 
and the fine symmetry of the great facade, give 



an air of simplicity to the distant view of this 
edifice, which is not diminished, on nearer ap- 
proach, by the unrivalled beauty of its orna- 
ments and detail; but when you cross the 
threshold of the portico, and pass under its 
noble archway into the inner court, all consi- 
derations are absorbed in the throb of admira- 
tion, which is excited by the sudden display of 
all that is lovely and harmonious in Grecian 
architecture. You find yourself in the midst 
of the noblest and yet chastest display of archi- 
tectural beauty, where every ornament pos- 
sesses the character by which the whole is 
distinguished, and where the whole possesses 
the grace and elegance which every ornament 
presents : — You find yourself on the spot, 
where all the monuments of ancient art are 
deposited — where the greatest exertions of 
mortal genius are preserved — and where a 
palace has at last been raised worthy of being 
j the depository of the collected genius of the 
human ra.ee. — It bears a higher character than 
that of being the residence of imperial power; 
it seems destined to loftier purposes than to 
be the abode of earthly greatness ; and the only 
forms by which its halls would not be degraded, 
are those models of ideal perfection which the 
genius of ancient Greece created to exalt the 
character of a heathen world. 

Placed in a more elevated spot, and destined 
to a still higher object, the Pantheon bears in 
its front the traces of the noble purpose for 
which it was intended. — It was intended to 
be the cemetery of all the great men who 
had deserved well of their country ; and it 
bears the inscription, above its entrance, Jux 
grands Jlrncs La Patrie rcconnohsante. The 
character of its architecture is well adapted to 
the impression it is intended to convey, and 
suits the simplicity of the noble inscription 
which its portico presents. Its situation has 
been selected with singular taste, to aid the 
effect which was thus intended. It is placed 
at the top of an eminence, which shelves in a 
declivity on every side ; and the immediate 
approach is by an immense flight of steps, 
which form the base of the building, and in- 
crease the effect which its magnitude produces. 
Over the entrance rises a portico of lofty pil- 
lars, finely proportioned, supporting a magni- 
ficent entablature of the Corinthian order; 
and the whole terminates in a dome of vast 
dimensions, forming the highest object in the 
whole city. The impression which every one 
must feel in crossing its threshold, is that of 
religious awe; the individual is lost in the great- 
ness of the objects with which he is surrounded, 
and he dreads to enter what seems the abode 
of a greater power, and to have been framed 
for the purposes of more elevated worship. 
The Louvre might have been fitted for the gay 
scenes of ancient sacrifice ; it suits the brilliant 
conceptions of heathen mythology; and seems 
the fit abode of those ideal forms, in which the 
imagination of ancient times imbodied their 
conceptions of divine perfection; but the Pan- 
theon is adapted for a holier worship, and 
accords with the character of a purer belief; 
and the vastness and solitude of its untrodden 
chambers awaken those feelings of human 
weakness, and that sentiment of human im- 
i 2 



102 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



mortality which befit the temple of a spiritual 
faith. 

The spectator is led, by the sight of this 
great monument of sacred architecture in the 
Grecian style, to compare it with the Gothic 
churches of France, and, in particular, with 
the Cathedral of Beauvais, the interior of 
which is finished with greater delicacy, and in 
finer proportions, than any other edifice of a 
similar kind in that country. The impression 
which the inimitable choir of Beauvais pro- 
duces is widely different from that which we 
felt on entering the lofty dome of the Pantheon 
at Paris. The light pinnacles, the fretted roof, 
the aspiring form of the Gothic edifice, seemed 
to have been framed by the hands of aerial 
beings ; and produced, even from a distance, 
that impression of grace and airiness which it 
was the peculiar object of this species of 
Gothic architecture to excite. On passing the 
high archway which covers the western door, 
and entering the immense aisles of the Cathe- 
dral, the sanctity of the place produces a deeper 
impression, and the grandeur of the forms 
awakens profounder feelings. The light of 
day is excluded, the rays of the sun come mel- 
lowed through the splendid colours with which 
the windows are stained, and cast a religious 
light over the marble pavement which covers 
the floor; while the eye reposes on the har- 
monious forms of the lancet windows, or is 
bewildered in the profusion of ornament with 
which the roof is adorned, or is lost in the 
deep perspective of its aisles. The impres- 
sion which the whole produces, is that of reli- 
gious emotion, singularly suited to the genius 
of Christianity ; it is seen in that obscure light 
which fits the solemnity of religious duty, and 
awakens those feelings of intense delight, 
which prepare the mind for the high strain of 
religious praise. But it is not the deep feeling 
of humility and weakness which is produced 
by the dark chambers and massy pillars of the 
Pantheon at Paris ; it is not in the mausoleum 
of the dead that you seem to wander, nor on 
the thoughts of the great that have gone before 
you, that the mind revolves ; it is in the scene 
of thanksgiving that your admiration is fixed; 
it is with the emblems of hope that your devo- 
tion is awakened, and with the enthusiasm of 
gratitude that the mind is filled. Beneath the 
gloomy roof of the Grecian temple, the spirit 
is concentrated within itself; it seeks the re- 
pose which solitude affords, and meditates on 
the fate of the immortal soul; but it loves to 
follow the multitude into the Gothic cathedral, 
to join in the song of grateful praise which 
peals through its lengthened aisles, and to 
share in the enthusiasm which belongs to the 
exercise of common devotion. 

The Cathedral of Notre Dame is the only 
Gothic building of note in Paris, and it is by 
no means equal to the expectations that are 
naturally formed of it. The style of its archi- 
tecture is not that of the finest Gothic ; it has 
neither the exquisite lightness of ornament 
which distinguish the summit of Gloucester 
Cathedral, nor the fine lancet windows which 
give so unrivalled a beauty to the interior of 
Beauvais, nor the richness of roof which 
covers the tombs of Westminster Abbey. Its 



character is that of massy greatness ; its orna 
ments are rich rather than elegant, and its in- 
terior striking, more from its immense size 
than the beauty of the proportion in which it is 
formed. In spite of all these circumstances, 
however, the Cathedral of Notre Dame pro- 
duces a deep impression on the mind of the 
beholder: its towers rise to a stupendous 
height above all the buildings which surround 
them ; while the stone of every other edifice 
is of a light colour, they alone are black with 
the smoke of centuries; and exhibit a venera- 
ble aspect of ancient greatness in the midst of 
the brilliancy of modern decoration with which 
the city is filled. Even the crowd of ornaments 
with which they are loaded, and the heavy 
proportion in which they are built, are forgot- 
ten in the effect which their magnitude pro- 
duces ; they suit the gloomy character of the 
building they adorn, and accord with the ex- 
pression of antiquated power by which its 
aged forms are now distinguished. 

To those who have been accustomed to the 
form of worship which is established in Pro- 
testant countries, there is nothing so striking in 
the Catholic churches as the complete oblivion 
of rank, or any of the distinctions of estab- 
lished society which there universally prevails. 
There are no divisions of seats, nor any places 
fixed for any particular classes of society. 
All, of whatever rank or station, kneel alike 
upon the marble pavement; and the whole 
extent of the church is open for the devotion 
of all classes of the people. You frequently 
see the poorest citizens with their children 
kneeling on the stone, close to those of the 
highest rank, or the most extensive fortunes. 
This custom may appear painful to those who 
have been habituated to the forms of devotion 
in the English churches ; but it produces an 
impression on the mind of the spectator which 
nothing in our service is capable of effecting. 
To see the individual form lost in the im- 
mensity of the objects with which he is sur- 
rounded ; to see all ranks and ages blended in 
the exercise of common devotion; to see all 
distinction forgotten in the sense of common 
infirmity, suits the spirit of that religion which 
was addressed to the poor as w r ell as to the 
rich, and fits the presence of that being before 
whom all ranks are equal. 

Nor is it without a good effect upon the feel- 
ings of mankind, that this custom has formed 
a part of the Catholic service. Amidst that 
degradation of the great body of the people, 
which marks the greater part of the Catholic 
countries — amidst the insolence of aristocratic 
power, which the doctrines of the Catholic 
faith are so well suited to support, it is fitting 
there should be some occasions on which the 
distinctions of the world should be forgotten ; 
some moments in which the rich as well as 
the poor should be humbled before a greater 
power — in which they should be reminded of 
the common faith in which they have been 
baptized, of the common duties to which they 
are called, and the common hopes which they 
have been permitted to form. 

High Mass was performed in Notre Dame, 
with all the pomp of the Catholic service, for 
the souls of Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette and 



PARIS IN 1814. 



103 



the Dauphin, on May 9, 1814, soon after the 
king's arrival in Paris. The cathedral was 
hung with black in every part; the brilliancy 
of day wholly excluded, and it was lighted 
only by double rows of wax tapers, which 
burned round the coffins, placed in the centre 
of the choir. It was crowded to excess in every 
part; all the marshals, peers, and dignitaries 
of France were stationed with the royal 
family near the centre of the cathedral, and 
all the principal officers of the allied armies 
attended at the celebration of the service. 
The king was present, though, without being 
perceived by the vast assembly by whom he 
was surrounded; and the Duchess d'Angou- 
leme exhibited, in this melancholy duty, that 
mixture of firmness and sensibility by which 
her character has always been distinguished. 

It was said, that there were several persons 
present at this solemn service who had voted 
for the death of the king ; and many of those 
assembled must doubtless have been con- 
scious, that they had been instrumental in the 
death of those for whose souls this solemn 
service was now performing. The greater 
part, however, exhibited the symptoms of ge- 
nuine sorrow, and seemed t- participate in 
the solemnity with unfeigned devotion. The 
Catholic worship was here displayed in its 
utmost splendour; all the highest prelates of 
France were assembled to give dignity to the 
spectacle ; and all that art could devise was 
exhausted to render the scene impressive in 
the eyes of the people. To those, however, 
who had been habituated to the simplicity 
of the English form, the variety of unmean- 
ing ceremony, the endless gestures and un- 
ceasing bows of the clergy who officiated, 
destroyed the impression which the solemnity 
of the service would otherwise have produced. 
But though the service itself appeared ridi- 
culous, the effect of the whole scene was 
sublime in the greatest degree. The black 
tapestry hung in heavy folds round the sides 
of the cathedral, and magnified the impres- 
sion which its vastness produced. The tapers 
which surrounded the coffins threw a red and 
gloomy light over the innumerable multitude 
which thronged the floor; their receding rays 
faintly illuminated the further recesses, or 
strained to pierce the obscure gloom in which 
the summits of the pillars were lost; while 
the sacred music pealed through the distant 
aisles, and deepened the effect of the thousands 
of voices which joined in the strains of re- 
pentant prayer. 

Among the exhibitions of art to which a 
stranger is conducted immediately after his 
arrival in the French metropolis, there is 
none which is more characteristic of the dis- 
position of the people than the Musec des Monu- 
ment Francois, situated in the Rue des Petits 
Augustins. This is a collection of all the 
finest sepulchral monuments from different 
parts of France, particularly from the Cathe- 
dral of St. Denis, where the cemetery of the 
royal family had, from time immemorial, 
been placed. It is said by the French, that 
the collection of these monuments into one 
museum was the only means of preserving 
them from the fury of the people during the 



Revolution ; and certainly nothing but abso- 
lute necessity could have justified the bar- 
barous idea of bringing them from the graves 
they were intended to adorn, to one spot, 
where all associations connected with them 
are destroyed. It is not the mere survey of 
the monuments of the dead that is interesting, 
— not the examination of the specimens of art 
by which they may be adorned; — it is the 
remembrance of the deeds which they are 
intended to record, — of the virtues they are 
destined to perpetuate, — of the pious gratitude 
of which they are now the only testimony — > 
above all, of the dust they actually cover. 
They remind us of the great men who formerly 
filled the theatre of the world, — they carry us 
back to an age which, by a very natural illu- 
sion, we conceive to have been both wiser 
and happier than our own, and present the 
record of human greatness in that pleas- 
ing distance when the great features of cha- 
racter alone are remembered, when time has 
drawn its veil over the weaknesses of mor- 
tality, and its virtues are sanctified by the 
hand of death. It is a feeling fitted to elevate 
the soul ; to mingle the thoughts of death 
with the recollection of the virtues by which 
life had been dignified, and renovate in every 
heart those high hopes of religion which 
spring from the grave of former virtue. 

All this delightful, this purifying illusion, is 
destroyed by the way in which the monuments 
are collected in the museum at Paris. They 
are there brought together from all parts of 
France ; severed from the ashes of the dead 
they were intended to cover; and arranged in 
systematic order to illustrate the history of the 
art whose progress they unfold. The tombs 
of all the kings of France, of all the generals 
by whom its glory has been extended, of the 
statesmen by whom its power, and the writers 
by whom its fame has been established, are 
crowded together in one collection, and heaped 
upon each other, without any other connection 
than that of the time in which they were origi- 
nally raised. The museum accordingly ex- 
hibits, in the most striking manner, the power 
of arrangement and classification which the 
French possess; it is valuable, as containing 
fine models of the greatest men which France 
has produced, and exhibits a curious speci- 
men of the progress of art, from its first 
commencement, to the period of its greatest 
perfection; but it has wholly lost that deep 
and peculiar interest which belongs to t'"» 
monuments of the dead in their original 
situation. 

Adjoining to the museum, is a garden 
planted with trees, in which many of the 
finest monuments are placed; but in which 
the depravity of the French taste appears in 
the most striking manner. It is surrounded 
with high houses, and darkened by the shade 
of lofty buildings: yet in this gloomy situa- 
tion, they have placed the tomb of Fenelon, 
and the united monument of Abelard and 
Eloise: profaning thus, by the barbarous 
affectation of artificial taste, and the still more 
shocking imitation of ancient superstition, the 
remains of those whose names are enshrined 
in every heart which can feel the beauty of 



104 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



moral excellence, or share in the sympathy 
with youthful sorrow. 

How different are the feelings with which 
an Englishman surveys the untouched monu- 
ments of English greatness! — and treads the 
floor of that venerable building which shrouds 
the remains of all who have dignified their 
native land — in which her patriots, her poets, 
and her philosophers "sleep with her kings, 
and dignify the scene," which the rage of 
popular fury has never dared to profane, and 
the hand of victorious power has never been 
able to violate; where the ashes of ihe im- 
mortal dead still lie in undisturbed repose, 
under that splendid roof which covered the 
tombs of its earliest kings, and witnessed, 
from its first dawn, the infant glory of the 
English people. — Nor could the remembrance 
of these national monuments ever excite in 
the mind of a native of France, the same 
feeling of heroic devotion which inspired the 
sublime expression of Nelson, as lie boarded 
the Spanish Admiral's ship at St. Vincent's — 
" Westminster Abbey or victory !" 

Though the streets in Paris have an aged 
and uncomfortable appearance, the form of 
the houses is such, as, at a distance, to present 
a picturesque aspect. Their height, their 
sharp and irregular tops, the vast variety of 
forms which they assume when seen from 
different quarters, all combine to render a dis- 
tant view of them more striking than the long 
rows of uniform houses of which London is 
composed. The domes and steeples of Paris, 
however, are greatly inferior, both in number 
and magnificence, to those of the English 
capital. 

The gardens of the Tuileries and the 
Luxembourg, of which the Parisians think so 
highly, and which are constantly filled with all 
ranks of citizens, are laid out with a singular- 
ity of taste, of which, in this country, we can 
scarcely form any conception. The straight 
walks — the dipt trees — the marble fountains 
are fast wearing out in all parts of England; 
they are to be met with only round the man- 
sions of ancient families, and, even there are 
kept rather from the influence of ancient 
prejudice, or from the affection to hereditary 
forms, than from their coincidence with the 
present taste of the English people. They 
are seldom, accordingly, disagreeable, with us, 
to the eye of the most cultivated taste; their 
singularity forms a pleasing variety to the 
continued succession of lawns and shrub- 
beries which are everywhere to be met with ; 
and they are regarded rather as the venerable 
marks of ancient splendour, than as the bar- 
barous affectation of modern distinction. In 
France, the native deformity of this taste 
appears in its real light, without the colouring 
of any such adventitious circumstances as 
conceal it in this country. It does not exist 
under the softening veil of ancient manners ; 
its avenues do not conduct to the decaying 
abode of hereditary greatness — its gardens do 
not mark the scenes of former festivity — its 
fountains are not covered with the moss which 
has grown for centuries. It appears as the mo- 
del of present taste ; it is considered as the indi- 
cation of existing splendour ; and sought after I 



as the form in which the beauty of nature is 
now to be admired. All that association 
blends in the mind with the style of ancient 
gardening in England is instantly divested by 
its appearance in France; and the whole im- 
portance is then felt of that happy change in 
the national taste, whereby variety has been 
made to succeed to uniformity, and the imita- 
tion of nature to come in the place of the exhi- 
bition of art. 

The remarkable characteristic of the taste 
of France is, that this love of artificial beauty 
continues with undiminished force, at a period 
when, in other nations, it has given place to a 
mote genuine love for the beauty of nature. 
In them, the natural progress of refinement 
has led from the admiration of the art of imita- 
tion to the love of the subjects imitated. In 
France, this early prejudice continues in its 
pristine vigour at the present moment: they 
never lose sight of the effort of the artist ; their 
admiration is fixed not on the quality or object 
in nature, but on the artificial representation 
of it ; not on the thing signified, but the sign. 
It is hence that they have such exalted ideas 
of the perfection of their artist David, whose 
paintings are nothing more than a representa- 
tion of the human figure in its most extrava- 
gant and phrenzied attitudes; that they are 
insensible to the simple display of real emo- 
tion, but dwell with delight upon the vehement 
representation of it which their stage exhibits ; 
and that, leaving the charming heights of Belle- 
ville, or the sequestered banks of the Seine 
almost wholly deserted, they crowd to the stiff 
alleys of the Elysian Fields, or the artificial 
beauties of the gardens of Versailles. 

In the midst of Paris this artificial style of 
gardening is not altogether unpleasing ; it is 
in unison, in some measure, with the regular 
character of the buildings with which it is 
surrounded; and the profusion of statues and 
marble vases continues the impression which 
the character of their palaces is fitted to pro- 
duce. But at Versailles, at St. Cloud, and 
Fontainbleau, amidst the luxuriance of vegeta- 
tion, and surrounded by the majesty of forest 
scenery, it destroys altogether the effect which 
arises from the irregularity of natural beauty. 
Every one feels straight borders, and square 
porticoes and broad alleys, to be in unison 
with the immediate neighbourhood of an anti- 
quated mansion ; but they become painful 
when extended to those remoter parts of the 
grounds, when the character of the scene is 
determined by the rudeness of uncultivated 
nature. 

There are some occasions, nevertheless, on 
which the gardens of the Tuileries present a 
beautiful spectacle, in spite of the artificial 
taste in which they are formed. From the 
waynth of the climate, the Parisians, of all 
classes, live much in the open air, and frequent 
the public gardens in great numbers during 
the continuance of the fine weather. In the 
evening especially, they are filled with citi- 
zens, who repose themselves under the shade 
of the lofty trees, after the heat and the fa- 
tigues of the day; and they there present a 
spectacle of more than ordinary interest and 
beauty. The disposition of the French suits 



PARIS IN 1814. 



105 



the character of the scene, and harmonizes 
with the impression which the stillness of the 
evening produces on the mind. There is 
none of that rioting or confusion by which an 
assembly of the middling classes in England 
is too often disgraced ; no quarrelling or in- 
toxication even among the poorest ranks, nor 
any appearance of that degrading want which 
destroys the pleasing idea of public happiness. 
The people appear all to enjoy a certain share 
of individual prosperity ; their intercourse is 
conducted with unbroken harmony, and they 
seem to resign themselves to those delightful 
feelings which steal over the mind during the 
stillness and serenity of a summer evening. 
It would seem as if all the angry passions of 
the breast were soothed by the voice of repos- 
ing nature — as if the sounds of labour were 
stilled, lest they should break the harmony of 
the scene — as if vice itself had concealed its 
deformity from the overpowering influence of 
aatural beauty. 

Still more beautiful, perhaps, is the appear- 
ance of this scene during the stillness of the 
night, when the moon throws her dubious rays 
over the objects of nature. The gardens of 
the Tuileries remain crowded with people, 
who seem to enjoy the repose which univer- 
sally prevails, and from whom no sound is to 
be heard which can break the stillness or the 
serenity of the scene. The regularity of the 
forms is wholly lost in the masses of light and 
shadow that are there displayed ; the foliage 
throws a checkered shade over the ground 
beneath, while the distant vistas of the Elysian 
Fields are seen in that soft and mellow light 
by which the radiance of the moon is so pecu- 
liarly distinguished. After passing through 
the scenes of gaiety and festivity which mark 
these favourite scenes of the French people, 
small encampments were frequently to be seen, 
of the allied troops, in the remote parts of the 
grounds. The appearance of these bivouacks, 
composed of Cossack squadrons, Hungarian 
hussars, and Prussian artillery, in the obscurity 
of moonlight, and surrounded by the gloom of 
forest scenery, was beyond measure striking. 
The picturesque forms of the soldiers, sleeping 
on their arms under the shade of the trees, or 
half hid by the rude huts which they had 
erected for their shelter; the varied attitudes 
of the horses standing amidst the wagons by 
which the camp was followed, or sleeping be- 
side the veterans whom they had borne through 
all the fortunes of war; the dark masses of the 
artillery, dimly discerned in the shades of 
night, or faintly reflecting the pale light of the 
moon, presented a scene of the most beautiful 
description, in which the rude features of war 
were softened by the tranquillity of peaceful 
life: and the interest of present repose was 
enhanced by the remembrance of the wintry 
storms and bloody fields through which these 
brave men had passed, during the memorable 
campaigns in which they had been engaged. 
The effect of the whole was increased by the 
perfect stillness which everywhere prevailed, 
broken only at intervals by the slow step of 
the sentinel, as he paced his rounds, or the 
sweeter sounds of those beautiful airs, which, 
in a far distant country, recalled to the Russian 
14 



soldier the joys and the happiness of his native 
land. 

St. Cloud was the favourite residence of 
Bonaparte, and, from this circumstance, pos- 
sesses an interest which does not belong to 
the other imperial palaces. It stands high, 
upon a lofty bank overhanging the Seine, 
which takes a bold sweep in the plain below; 
and the steep declivity which descends to its 
banks, is clothed with magnificent woods of 
aged elms. The character of the scenery is 
bold and rugged; — the trees are of the wildest 
forms, and the most stupendous height, and 
the banks, for the most part, steep and irregu- 
lar. It is here, accordingly, that the French 
gardening appears in all its genuine deformity ; 
and that its straight walks and endless foun- 
tains display a degree of formality and art, 
destructive to the peculiar beauty by which 
the scene is distinguished. These gardens, 
however, were the favourite and private walks 
of the emperor ; — it was there that he meditated 
those schemes of ambition which were des- 
tined to shake the established thrones of 
Europe ; — it was under the shade of its luxu- 
riant foliage that he formed the plan of all the 
mighty projects which he had in contempla- 
tion ; — it was in the splendid apartments of 
its palace that the Councils of France assem- 
bled, to revolve on the means of permanently 
destroying the English power : — It was here 
too, by a most remarkable coincidence, that 
his destruction was finally accomplished; — 
that the last convention was concluded, by 
which his second dethronement was com- 
pleted ; — and that the victorious arms of Eng- 
land dictated the terms of surrender to his 
conquered capital. 

St. Cloud, in 1814, was the head-quarters 
of Prince Schwartzenberg; and the Austrian 
grenadiers mounted guard at the gates of the 
Imperial Palace. The banks of the Seine, 
below the palace, were covered by an immense 
bivouac of Austrian troops, and the fires of 
their encampment twinkled in the obscurity 
of twilight, amidst the low brushwood with 
which the sides of the river were clothed. The 
appearance of this bivouac, dimly discerned 
through the rugged stems of lofty trees, or 
half-hid by the luxuriant branches which ob- 
scured the view — the picturesque and varied 
aspect of the camp, covered with wagons, and 
all the accompaniments of military service ; — 
the columns of smoke rising from the fires 
with which it was interspersed, and the in- 
numerable horses crowded amidst the con- 
fused multitude of men and carriages, or rest- 
ing in more sequestered spots on the sides of 
the river, with their forms finely reflected in 
its unruffled waters — presented a spectacle 
which exhibited war in its most striking aspect, 
and gave a character to the scene which would 
have suited the romantic strain of Salvator's 
mind. 

St. Germain, though less picturesquely situ- 
ated than St. Cloud, presents features, never- 
theless, of more than ordinary magnificence. 
The Palace, now converted into a school of 
military education by Napoleon, is a mean 
irregular building; though it possesses a cer- 
tain interest, by having been long the residence 



106 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



of the exiled house of Stuart. The situation, 
however, is truly fitted for an imperial dwell- 
ing; it stands on the edge of a high bank, 
overhanging the Seine, at the end of a magnifi- 
cent terrace, a mile and a half long, built on 
the projecting heights which edge the river. 
The walk along this terrace is the finest spec- 
tacle which the vicinity of Paris has to present. 
It is backed along its whole extent by the im- 
mense forest of St. Germain, the foliage of 
which overhangs the road, and in the recesses 
of which you can occasionally discern those 
beautiful peeps which form the peculiar charac- 
teristic of forest scenery. The steep bank 
which descends to the river is clothed with 
orchards and vineyards in all the luxuriance 
of a southern climate, and, in front, there is 
spread beneath your feet the immense plain 
in which the Seine wanders, whose waters are 
descried at intervals through the woods and 
gardens with which its banks are adorned; 
while, in the farthest distance, the towers of 
St. Denis, and the heights of Paris, form an 
irregular outline on the verge of the horizon. 
It is a scene exhibiting the most beautiful 
aspect of cultivated nature, and would have 
been the fit residence for a monarch who loved 
to survey his subjects' happiness: but it was 
deserted by the miserable weakness of Louis 
XIV., because the view terminated in the 
cemetery of the kings of France, and his en- 
joyment of it would have been destroyed by 
the thoughts of mortal decay. 

Versailles, which that monarch chose as the 
ordinary abode of his splendid court, is less 
favourably situate for a royal dwelling, though 
the view from the great front of the palace is 
beautifully clothed with luxuriant woods. The 
palace itself is a magnificent building of im- 
mense extent, loaded with the riches of archi- 
tectural beauty, but destitute of that fine pro- 
portion and lightness of ornainent, which 
spread so indescribable a charm over the 
palace of the Louvre. The interior is in a 
state of lamentable decay, having been pillaged 
at the commencement of the revolutionary 
fury, and formed into a barrack for the repub- 
lican soldiers, the marks of whose violence 
are still visible in the faded splendour of its 
magnificent apartments. They still show, how- 
ever, the favourite apartments of Maria An- 
toinette, the walls of which are covered with 
the finest mirrors, and some remains of the 
furniture are still preserved, which even the 
licentious fury of the French army seems to 
have been afraid to violate. The gardens, on 
which all the riches of France, and all the 
efforts of art were so long lavished, present a 
painful monument of the depravity of taste: 
but the Petit Trianon, which is a little palace 
built of marble, and surrounded by shrubberies 
in the English style, exhibits the genuine 
beauty of which the imitation of nature is sus- 
ceptible. This palace contains a suite of 
splendid apartments, fitted up with singular 
taste, and adorned with a number of charming 
pictures ; it was the favourite residence of 
Maria Louise, and we were there shown the 
drawing materials which she used, and some 
unfinished sketches which she left, in which, 



we were informed, she much delighted, and 
which bore the marks of a cultivated taste. 

The Empress Maria Louise was everywhere 
represented as cold, proud, and haughty in her 
manner, and unconciliating in her ordinary ad- 
dress. Her time was much spent in private, 
in the exercise of religious duty, or in needle- 
work and drawing; and her favourite seat at 
St. Cloud was between two windows, from 
one of which she had a view over the beauti- 
ful woods which clothe the banks of the river, 
and from the other a distant prospect of the 
towers and domes of Paris. 

Very different was the character which be- 
longed to the former empress, the first wife of 
Bonaparte, Josephine. She passed the close 
of her life at the delightful retreat of Mal- 
maison, a villa eharmingly situated on the 
banks of the Seine, seven miles from Paris, on 
the road to St. Germain. This villa had been 
her favourite residence while she continued 
empress, and formed her only home after the 
period of her divorce; — here she lived in 
obscurity and retirement, without any of the 
pomp of a court, or any of the splendour which 
belonged to her former rank, occupied entirely 
in the employment of gardening, or in allevi- 
ating the distresses of those around her. The 
shrubberies and gardens were laid out with 
singular beauty, in the English taste, and con- 
tained a vast variety of rare flowers, which 
she had for a long period been collecting. 
These grounds were to her the source of never- 
failing enjoyment; she spent many hours in 
them every day, working herself, or superin- 
tending the occupations of others ; and in these 
delightful occupations seemed to return as;ain 
to all the innocence and happiness of youth. 
She was beloved, to the greatest degree, by 
all the poor who inhabited the vicinity of her 
retreat, both for the gentleness of her man- 
ner, and her unwearied attention to their suf- 
ferings and their wants ; and during the whole 
period of her retirement, she retained the 
esteem and affection of all classes of French 
citizens. The Emperor Alexander visited her 
repeatedly during the stay of the allied armies 
in Paris ; and her death occasioned an univer- 
sal feeling of regret, rarely to be met with 
amidst the corruption and selfishness of the 
French metropolis. 

There was something singularly striking in 
the history and character of this remarkable, 
woman : — Born in an humble station, without 
any of the advantages which rank or education 
could afford, she was early involved in all the 
unspeakable miseries of the French revolution, 
and was extricated from her precarious situa- 
tion only by being united to that extraordinary 
man whose crimes and whose ambition have 
spread misery through every country of Eu- 
rope; rising through all the gradations of 
rank through which he passed, she everywhere 
commanded the esteem and regard of all who 
had access to admire her private virtues ; and 
when at length she was raised to the rank of 
Empress, she graced the imperial throne with 
all the charities and virtues of an humbler sta- 
tion. She bore, with unexampled,magnanimity, 
the sacrifice of power and of influence which 



PARIS IN 1814. 



107 



she was compelled to make: she carried into 
the obscurity of humble life all the dignity of 
mind which befitted the character of an em- 
press of France ; and exercised, in the delight- 
ful occupations of country life, or in the alle- 
viation of the severity of individual distress, 
that firmness of mind and gentleness of dis- 
position with which she had lightened the 
weight of imperial dominion, and softened the 
rigour of despotic power. 

The Forest of Fontainbleau exhibits scenery 
of a more picturesque and striking character 
than is to be met with in any other part of the 
north of France. It is situated forty miles from 
Paris, on the great road to Rome, and the ap- 
pearance of the country through which this 
road runs, is, for the most part, flat and unin- 
teresting. It runs through a continued plain, 
in a straight line between tall rows of elm 
trees, whose lower branches are uniformly cut 
off for fire-wood to the peasantry ; and exhibits, 
for the most part, no other feature than the 
continued riches of agricultural produce. At 
the distance of seven miles from the town of 
Fontainbleau, you first discern the forest, 
covering a vast ridge of rocks, stretching as far 
as the eye can reach, from right to left, and 
presenting a dark irregular outline on the sur- 
face of the horizon. The cultivation continues, 
with all its uniformity, to the very foot of the 
ridge ; but the moment you pass the boundaries 
of the forest, you find yourself surrounded at 
once with all the wildness and luxuriance of 
natural scenery. The surface of the ground 
is broken and irregular, rising at times into 
vast piles of shapeless rocks, and enclosing at 
others small valleys, in which the wood grows 
in luxuriant beauty, unblighted by the chilling 
blasts of northern climates. In these valleys, 
the oak, the ash, and the beech, exhibit the 
peculiar magnificence of forest scenery, while, 
on the neighbouring hills, the birch waves its 
airy foliage round the dark masses of rock 
which terminate the view. Nothing can be 
conceived more striking than the scenery 
which this variety of rock and wood produces 
in every part of this romantic forest. At times 
you pass through an unbroken mass of aged 
timber, surrounded by the native grandeur of 
forest scenery, and undisturbed by any traces 
of human habitation, except in those rude 
paths which occasionally open a passing view 
into the remoter parts of the forest. At others, 
the path winds through great masses of rock, 
piled in endless confusion upon each other, 
in the crevices of which, the fern and the 
heath grow in all the luxuriance of southern 
vegetation; while their summits are covered 
by aged oaks of the wildest forms, whose 
crossing boughs throw an eternal shade over 
the ravines below, and afford room only to 
discern at the farthest distance the summits 
of those beautiful hills, on which the light 
foliage of the birch trembles in the ray of an 
unclouded sun, or waves on the blue of a sum- 
mer heaven. 

To those who have had the good fortune to 
see the beautiful scenery of the Trosachs in 
Scotland, of Matlock in Derbyshire, or of the 
wooded Fells in Cumberland, it may afford 
some idea of the Forest of Fontainbleau, to 



say that it combines scenery of a similar de- 
scription with the aged magnificence of Wind- 
sor Forest. Over its whole extent there are 
scattered many detached oaks of vast dimen- 
sions, which seem to be of an older race 
in the growth of the forest, — whose lowest 
boughs stretch above the top of the wood 
which surrounds them, — and whose decayed 
summits afford a striking contrast to the 
young and luxuriant foliage with Avhich their 
stems are enveloped. In May, 1814, it was 
occupied by the old imperial guard, which 
still remained in that station after the abdica- 
tion of Bonaparte ; and parties, or detached 
stragglers of them, were frequently to be met 
with wandering in the most solitary parts of 
the forest. Their warlike and weather-beaten 
appearance ; their battered arms and worn 
accoutrements ; the dark feathers of their caps, 
and the sallow ferocious aspect of their coun- 
tenances, suited the savage character of the 
scenery with which they were surrounded, 
and threw over the gloom and solitude of the 
forest that wild expression with which the 
genius of Salvator dignified the features of 
uncultivated nature. 

The town and palace of Fontainbleau is sit- 
uated in a small plain near the centre of the 
forest, and surrounded on all sides by the 
rocky ridges with which it is everywhere in- 
tersected. The palace is a large irregular 
building, composed of many squares, and 
fitted up in the inside with the utmost splen- 
dour of imperial magnificence. The apart- 
ments in which Napoleon dwelt during his 
stay in the palace, after the capture of Paris 
by the allied troops ; and the desk at which 
he always wrote, and where his abdication 
was signed, are there shown. It is covered 
with white leather, scratched over in every 
direction, and marked with innumerable wip- 
ings of the pen, among which his own name, 
Napoleon, frequently written as in a hur- 
ried and irregular hand, was to be seen; 
and one sentence which began, " Que Dieu, 
Napoleon, Napoleon." The servants in the 
palace agreed in stating, that the emperor's 
gaiety and fortitude of mind never deserted 
him during the ruin of his fortune ; that he 
was engaged in his writing-chamber during 
the greater part of the day, and walked for 
two hours on the terrace, in close conversa- 
tion with Marshal Ney. Several officers of 
the imperial guard repeated the speech which 
he made to his troops on leaving them after 
his abdication of the throne, which was precise- 
ly what appeared in the English newspapers. 
So great was the enthusiasm produced by this 
speech among the soldiers present, that it 
was received with shouts and cries of Vive 
l'Empereur, a Paris, a Paris! and when he 
departed under the custody of the allied com- 
missioners, the whole army wept; there was 
not a dry eye in the multitude who were as- 
sembled to witness his departure. Even the 
imperial guard, who had been trained in scenes 
of suffering from their first entry into the 
service — who had been inured for a long course 
of years to the daily sight of human misery, 
and had constantly made a sport of all the 
afflictions which are fitted to move the human 



108 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



heart, shared in the general grief; they seemed 
to forget the degradation in which their com- 
mander was involved, the hardships to which 
they had been exposed, and the destruction 
which he had brought upon their brethren in 
arms; they remembered him when he stood 
victorious on the field of Austerlitz, or passed 
in triumph through the gates of Moscow, and 
shed over the fall of their emperor those tears 
of genuine sorrow which they denied to the 
deepest scenes of private suffering, or the most 
aggravated instances of individual distress. 

The infantry of the old guard was frequently 
to be seen drawn up in line in the streets of 
Fontainbleau, and their appearance was such 
as fully answered the idea we had formed of 
that body of veteran soldiers, who had borne 
the French eagles through every capital of 
Europe. Their aspect was bold and martial ; 
there was a keenness in their eyes which be- 
spoke the characteristic intelligence of the 
French soldiers, and a ferocity in the expres- 
sion of their countenances which seemed to 
have been unsubdued even by the unparalleled 
disasters in which their country had been in- 
volved. The people of the town itself com- 
plained in the bitterest terms of their licen- 
tious conduct, and repeatedly said that they 
dreaded them more as friends than the Cos- 
sacks themselves as enemies. They seemed 
to harbour the most unbounded resentment 
against the people of this country ; their coun- 
tenances bore the expression of the strongest 
enmity against the English. Whatever the 
atrocity of their conduct ; however it might 
have been to the people of their own, as well as 
every other country, it was impossible not 
to feel the strongest emotion at the sight of 
the. veteran soldiers whose exploits had so 
long rivetted the attention of all who felt an 
interest in the civilized world. These were 
the men who first raised the glory of the re- 
publican armies on the plains of Italy ; who 
survived the burning climate of Egypt, and 
chained victory to the imperial standards at 
Jena, at Friedland and Austerlitz — who fol- 
lowed the career of victory to the walls of the 
Kremlin, and marched undaunted through the 
ranks of death amid the snows of Russia; — 
who witnessed the ruin of France under the 
walls of Leipsic, and struggled to save its 
falling fortune on the heights of Laon ; and 
who preserved, in the midst of national humi- 
liation, and when surrounded by the mighty 
foreign powers, that undaunted air and un- 
shaken firmness, which, even in the moment 
of defeat, commanded the respect of their an- 
tagonists in arms. 

There is no scenery round Paris so striking 
as the Forest of Fontainbleau, but the heights 
of Belleville exhibit nature in a more pleasing 
aspect, and are distinguished by features of a 
gentler character. Montmartre, and the ridge 
of Belleville, form those celebrated heights 
which command Paris on the northern side, 
and which were so obstinately contested be- 
tween the allies and the French, on the 30th 
March, 1814, previous to the capture of Paris 
by the allied sovereigns. Montmartre is covered 
for the most part with houses, and presents 
nothing to attract the eye of the observer, ex- 



cept the extensive view which is to be met 
with at its summit. The heights of Belleville 
are varied with wood, with orchards, vine- 
yards, and gardens, interspersed with cottages 
and villas, and cultivated with the utmost 
care. There are few enclosures, but the whole 
extent of the ground is thicl-ly studded with 
walnuts, fruit-trees, and forest timber, which, 
from a distance, give it the appearance of one 
continued wood. On a nearer approach, how- 
ever, you find it intersected in every direction 
by small paths, which wind among the vine- 
yards, or through the woods with which the 
hills are covered, and present, at every turn, 
those charming little scenes which form the 
peculiar characteristic of woodland scenery. 
The cottages, half hid by the profusion of 
fruit-trees, or embosomed in the luxuriant 
woods, with which they are everywhere sur- 
rounded, increase the interest which the scene- 
ry itself is fitted to produce ; they combine the 
delightful idea of the peasant's enjoyment with 
the beauty of the spot on which his dwelling 
is placed; and awaken, in the midst of the 
boundless luxuriance of vegetable nature, 
those deeper feelings of moral delight, which 
spring from the contemplation of human happi- 
ness. 

The effect of the charming scenery on the 
heights of Belleville, is much increased by 
the distant objects which terminate some parts 
of the view. To the east, the high and gloomy 
towers of Vincennes rise over the beautiful 
woods with which the sides of the hill are 
adorned; and give an air of solemnity to the 
scene, arising from the remembrance of the 
tragic events of which it was the theatre. To 
the south, the domes and spires of Paris can 
occasionally be discovered through the open- 
ings of the wood with which the foreground 
is enriched, and present, the capital at that 
pleasing distance, when the minuter parts of 
the buildings are concealed, when its promi- 
nent features alone are displayed, and the 
whole is softened by the obscure light which 
distance throws over the objects of nature. 
To an English mind, the effect of the whole is 
infinitely increased, by the animating asso- 
ciations with which this scenery is connected; 
— by the remembrance of the mighty struggle 
between freedom and slavery, which was here 
terminated; — of the heroic deeds which were 
here performed, and the unequalled magnani- 
mity which was here displayed. It was here 
that the expiring efforts of military despotism 
were overthrown — that the armies of Russia 
stood triumphant over the power of France, 
and nobly avenged the ashes of their own ca- 
pital, by sparing that of their prostrate enemy. 

At this time the traces of the recent strug- 
gle were visibly imprinted on the villages and 
woods with which the hill is covered. The 
marks of blood were still to be discerned on 
the chaussee which leads through the village 
of Pantin; the elm trees which line the road 
were cut asunder or bored through with can- 
non shot, and their stems riddled in many 
parts, with the incessant fire of the grape shot. 
The houses in La Villette, Belleville, and Pantin, 
were covered with the marks of musket shot ; 
the windows of many were shattered, or wholly 



THE LOUVRE IN 1814. 



109 



destroyed, and the interior of the rooms broken 
by the balls which seemed to have pierced 
every part of the building. So thickly were 
the houses in some places covered with these 
marks, that it appeared almost incredible how 
any one could have escaped from so destruc- 
tive a fire. Even the beautiful gardens with 
which the slope of the heights are adorned, 
and the inmost recesses of the wood of Ro- 
mainville, bore, throughout, the marks of the 
desperate struggles which they had lately wit- 
nessed, and exhibited the symptoms of frac- 
ture or destruction in the midst of the luxu- 
riance of natural beauty ; — yet, though they 
had so recently been the scene of mortal com- 
bat ; though the ashes of the dead lay yet in 
heaps on different parts of the field of battle, 
the prolific powers of nature were undecayed: 
the vines clustered round the broken fragments 
of the instruments of war, — the corn spread a 
sweeter green over the fields, which were yet 
wet with human blood, and the trees waved 
with renovated beauty over the uncoffined re- 
mains of the departed brave; emblematic of 
the decay of man, and of the immortality of 
nature. 

The French have often been accused of sel- 
fishness, and the indifference which they often 
manifest to the fate of their relations affords 
too much reason to believe that the social af- 
fections have little permanent influence on their 
minds. They exhibit, however, in misfortunes 
of a different kind — in calamities which really 
press upon their own enjoyments of life — the 
same gayety of heart, and the same undisturbed 
equanimity of disposition. That gayety in 



misfortune, which is so painful to every ob- 
server, when it is to be found in the midst of 
family distress, becomes delightful when it 
exists under the deprivation of the selfish gra- 
tification to which the individual had been ac- 
customed. Both here, and in other parts of 
France, where the houses of the peasants had 
been wholly destroyed by the allied armies, 
there was much to admire in the equanimity 
of mind with which these poor people bore 
the loss of all their property. For an extent 
of thirty miles in one direction, towards the 
north of Champagne, every house near the 
great road had been burned or pillaged for the 
firewood which it contained, both by the French 
and allied armies, and the people were every 
where compelled to sleep in the open air. The 
men were everywhere rebuilding their fallen 
walls, with a cheerfulness which never would 
have existed in England under similar circum- 
stances ; and the little children laboured in the 
gardens during the clay, and slept under the 
vines at night, without exhibiting any signs 
of distress for their disconsolate situation. In 
many places we saw groups of these little 
children in the midst of the ruined houses, or 
under the shattered trees, playing with the 
musket shot, or trying to roll the cannon balls 
by which the destruction of their dwellings 
had been effected: — exhibiting a picture of 
youthful joy and native innocence, while sport- 
ing with the instruments of human destruc- 
tion, which the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds 
would have moulded into the expression of 
pathetic feeling, or employed as the means of 
moral improvement. 



THE LOUVRE IN 1814/ 



To those who have had the good fortune to 
see the pictures and statues which are pre- 
served in the Louvre, all description of these 
works must appear superfluous ; and to those 
who have not had this good fortune, such an 
attempt could convey no adequate idea of the 
objects which are described. There is nothing 
more uninteresting than the catalogue of pic- 
tures which are to be found in the works of many 
modern travellers ; nor any thing in general 
more ridiculous than the ravings of admira- 
tion with which this catalogue is described, 
and with which the reader in general is little 
disposed to sympathize. Without attempting, 
therefore, to enumerate the great works which 
are there to be met with, it is better to aim at 
nothing but the delineation of the general cha- 
racter by which the different schools of paint- 
ing are distinguished, and the great features 
in which they all differ from the sculpture of 
ancient times. 



* Written during a residence at Paris in May and 
June, 1814, and published in "Travels in France," in 
181 1-15, to the first volume of which the author con- 
tributed a few chapters. 



For an attempt of this kind, the Louvre pre- 
sents singular advantages, from the unparal- 
leled collection of paintings of every school 
and description \vhich are there to be met 
with, and the facility with which you can 
there trace the progress of the art from its 
first beginning to the period of its greatest 
perfection. And it is in this view that the 
collection of these works into one museum, 
however much to be deplored as the work of 
unprincipled ambition, and however much it 
may have diminished the impression which 
particular objects, from the influence of asso- 
ciation, produced in their native place, is yet 
calculated to produce the greatest of all im- 
provements in the progress of the art; by 
divesting particular schools and particular 
works of the unbounded influence which the 
effect of early association, or the prejudices of 
national feeling, have given them in their ori- 
ginal situation, and placing them where their 
real nature is to be judged of by a more ex- 
tended circle, and subjected to the examination 
of more impartial sentiments. 

The first hall of the Louvre, in the rjicturo 
K 



110 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



gallery, is filled with paintings of the French 
school. The principal artists whose works 
are here exhibited, are Le Brun, Gaspar and 
Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Vernet, and 
the modern painters Gerard and David. The 
general character of the school of French his- 
torical painting, is the expression of passion 
and violent emotion. The colouring is for the 
most part brilliant; the canvas crowded with 
figures, and the incident selected, that in which 
the painter might have the best opportunity of 
displaying his knowledge of the human frame, 
or the varied expression of the human counte- 
nance. In the pictures of the modern school 
of French painting, this peculiarity is pushed 
to an extravagant length, and, fortunately for 
the art, displays the false principles on which 
the S3 r stem of their composition is founded. The 
moment seized is uniformly that of the strongest 
and most violent passion; the principal actors 
in the piece are represented in a state of phren- 
zied exertion, and the whole anatomical know- 
ledge of the artist is displayed in the endless 
contortions into which the human frame is 
thrown. In David's celebrated picture of the 
three Horatii, this peculiarity appears in the 
most striking light. The works of this artist 
may excite admiration, but it is the limited 
and artificial admiration of the schools ; of 
those who have forgot the end of the art in the 
acquisition of the technical knowledge with 
which it is accompanied, or the display of the 
technical powers which its execution in- 
volves. 

The paintings of Vernet, in this collection, 
are perhaps the finest specimens of that beau- 
tiful master, and they entitle him to a higher 
place in the estimation of mankind than he 
seems yet to have obtained from the generality 
of observers. There is a delicacy of colour- 
ing, a unity of design, and a harmony of ex- 
pression in his works, which accord well with 
the simplicity of the subjects which his taste 
has selected, and the general effect which it 
was his object to produce. In the representa- 
tion of the sun dispelling the mists of a cloudy 
morning ; of his setting rays gilding the waves 
of a western sea; or of that undefined beauty 
which moonlight throws over the objects of 
nature, the works of this artist are perhaps 
unrivalled. 

The paintings of Claude are by no means 
equal to what might have been expected, from 
the celebrity which his name has acquired, or 
the matchless beauty which the engravings 
from him possess. They are but eleven in 
number, and cannot be, in any degree, com- 
pared with those which are to be found in Mr. 
Angerstein's collection. To those, however, 
who have been accustomed to study the de- 
signs of this great master, through the me- 
dium of the engraved copies, and above all, 
in the unrivalled works of Woollet, the sight 
of the original pictures must, perhaps at 
all times, create a feeling of disappointment. 
There is a unity of effect in the engravings 
which can never be met with amidst the dis- 
traction of colouring in the original pictures ; 
and the imagination clothes the beautiful 
shades of the copy with finer tints than even 
the pencil of Claude has been able to supply. 



"I have shown you," said Corinne to Oswald, 
" St. Peter's for the first time, when the bril- 
liancy of its decorations might appear in full 
splendour, in the rays of the sun : I reserve 
for you a finer, and a more profound enjoy- 
ment, to behold it by the light of the moon." 
Perhaps there is a distinction of the same 
kind between the gaudy brilliancy of varied 
colours, and the chaster simplicity of uniform 
shadows; and it is probably for this reason, 
that on the first view of a picture which you 
have long admired in the simplicity of en- 
graved effect, you involuntarily recede from 
the view, and seek in the obscure light, and 
uncertain tint, which distance produces, to 
recover that uniform tone and general charac- 
ter, which the splendour of colouring is so apt 
to destroy. It is a feeling similar to that which 
Lord Byron has so finely described, as arising 
from the beauty of moonlight scenery : — 

"Mellow'd to that tender light 

Which Heaven to gaudy day denies." 

The Dutch and Flemish school, to which 
you next advance, possesses merit, and is dis- 
tinguished by a character of a very different 
description. It was the well-known object of 
this school, to present an exact and faithful 
imitation of nature ; to exaggerate none of its 
faults, and enhance none of its excellencies, 
but exhibit it as it really appears to the eye of 
an ordinary spectator. Its artists selected, in 
general, some scene of humour or amusement, 
in the discovery of which, the most ignorant 
spectators might discover other sources of 
pleasure from those which the merit of the art 
itself afforded. They did not pretend to aim 
at the exhibition of passion or powerful emo- 
tion : their paintings, therefore, are free from 
that painful display of theatrical effect, which 
characterizes the French school ; their object 
was not to represent those deep scenes of sor- 
row or suffering, which accord with the pro- 
found feelings which it was the object of the 
Italian school to awaken; they want, therefore, 
the dignity and grandeur which the works of 
the greater Italian painters possess. Their 
merit consists in the faithful delineation of 
those ordinary scenes and common occur- 
rences which are familiar to the eye of the most 
careless observer. The power of the painter, 
therefore, could be displayed only in the mi- 
nuteness of the finishing, or the brilliancy of 
the effect: and he endeavoured, by the power- 
ful contrast of light and shade, to give a 
higher character to his works than the nature 
of their subjects could otherwise admit. The 
pictures of Teniers, Ostade, and Gerard Dow, 
possess these merits, and are distinguished by 
this character in the highest degree; but their 
qualities are so well known in this country, as 
to render any observations on them super- 
fluous. There is a very great collection here 
preserved, of the works of Rembrandt, and 
their design and effect bear, in general, a 
higher character than belongs to most of the 
works of this celebrated master. 

In one respect, the collection in the Louvre 
is altogether unrivalled; in the number and 
beauty of the Wouvermans which are there to 
be met with ; nor is it possible, without hav- 
ing seen it, to appreciate, with any degree of 



THE LOUVRE uV 1814. 



Ill 



justice, the variety of design, the accuracy of 
drawing, or delicacy of finishing, which dis- 
tinguish his works from those of any other 
painter of a similar description. There are 
forty of his pieces there assembled, all in the 
finest state of preservation, and all displaying 
the same unrivalled beauty of colouring and 
execution. In their design, however, they 
widely differ; and they exhibit, in the most 
striking manner, the real object to which 
painting should be applied, and the causes 
of the errors in which its composition has 
been involved. His works, for the most 
part, are crowded with figures ; his subjects 
are in general battle-pieces, or spectacles of 
military pomp, or the animated scenes which 
the chase presents; and he seems to have ex- 
hausted all the efforts of his genius, in the 
variety of incident and richness of execution, 
which these subjects are fitted to afford. From 
the confused and indeterminate expression 
however, which the multitude of their objects 
exhibit, the spectator turns with delight to 
those simpler scenes in which his mind seems 
to have reposed, after the fatigues which it 
had undergone ; to the representation of a 
single incident, or the delineation of a certain 
occurrence — to the rest of the traveller after 
the fatigues of the day — to the repose of the 
horse in the intermission of labour — to the re- 
turn of the soldier, after the dangers of the 
campaign ; — scenes in which every thing com- 
bines for the uniform character, and where 
the genius of the artist has been able to give 
to the rudest occupations of men, and even to 
the objects of animal life, the expression of 
genuine poetical feeling. 

The pictures of Vandyke and Rubens belong 
to a much higher school than that which rose 
out of the wealth and the limited taste of the 
Dutch people. There are sixty pictures of the 
latter of these masters in the Louvre, and, 
combined with the celebrated gallery in the 
Luxembourg palace, they form the finest as- 
semblage of them which is to be met with in 
the world. The character of his works differs 
essentially from that both of the French and 
the Dutch schools : he was employed, not in 
painting cabinet pictures for wealthy mer- 
chants, but in designing great altar pieces for 
splendid churches, or commemorating the 
glory of sovereigns in imperial galleries. The 
greatness of his genius rendered him fit to 
attempt the representation of the most com- 
plicated and difficult objects; but in the confi- 
dence of this genius, he seems to have lost 
sight of the genuine object of composition in 
his art. He attempts what it is impossible for 
painting to accomplish. He aims at telling a 
whole story by the expression of a single pic- 
ture; and seems to pour forth the profusion 
of his fancy, by crowding his canvas with a 
multiplicity of figures, which serve no other 
purpose than that of showing the endless 
power of creation which the author possessed. 
In each figure, there is great vigour of concep- 
tion, and admirable power of execution ; but 
the whole possesses no general character, and 
produces no permanent emotion. There is a 
mixture of allegory and truth in many of his 
greatest works, which is always painful ; a 



grossness in his conception of the female form, 
which destroys the symmetry of female beauty ; 
and a wildness of imagination in his general 
design, which violates the feelings of ordinary 
taste. You survey his pictures with astonish- 
ment — and the power of thought and the bril- 
liancy of colouring which they display; but 
they produce no lasting impression on the 
mind; they have struck no chord of feeling or 
emotion, and you leave them Avith no other 
feeling, than that of regret, that the confusion 
of objects destroys the effect which each in 
itself might be fitted to produce. And if one 
has made a deeper impression ; if you dweU 
on it with that delight which it should ever be 
the object of painting to produce, you find 
that your pleasure proceeds from a single 
figure, or the expression of a detached part of 
the picture; and that in the contemplation of 
it you have, without being conscious of it, 
detached your mind from the observation of 
all that might interfere with its characteristic 
expression, and thus preserved that unity of 
emotion which is essential to the existence of 
the emotion of taste, but which the confusion 
of incident is so apt to destroy. 

It is in the Italian school, however, that the 
collection in the Louvre is most unrivalled, 
and it is from its character that the general 
tendency of the modern school of historical 
painting is principally to be determined. 

The general object of the Italian school ap- 
pears to be the expression of passion. The 
peculiar subjects which its painters were 
called on to represent, the sufferings and death 
of our Saviour, the varied misfortunes to 
which his disciples were exposed, or the mul- 
tiplied persecutions which the early fathers of 
the church had to sustain, inevitably pre- 
scribed the object to which their genius was 
to be directed, and the peculiar character 
which their works were to assume. They 
have all, accordingly, aimed at the expression 
of passion, and endeavoured to excite the pity, 
or awaken the sympathy of the spectator; 
though the particular species of passion which 
they have severally selected has varied with 
the turn of mind which the artist possessed. 

The works of Dominichiuo and of the Ca- 
raccis, of which there are a very great num- 
ber, incline, in general, to the representation 
of what is dark or gloomy in character, or 
what is terrific and appalling in suffering. 
The subjects which the first of these masters 
has in general selected, are the cells of monks, 
the energy of martyrs, the death of saints, or 
the sufferings of the crucifixion ; and the dark- 
blue coldness of his colouring, combined with 
the depth of his shadows, accord well with the 
gloomy character which his compositions pos- 
sess. The Caraccis, amidst the variety of ob- 
jects which their genius has embraced, have 
dwelt, in general, upon the expression of sor- 
row — of that deep and profound sorrow which 
the subjects of sacred history were so fitted to 
afford, and which was so well adapted to that 
religious emotion which it was their object to 
excite. 

Guido Reni, Carlo Maratti, and Murillo, are 

distinguished by a gentler character; by the 

I expression of tenderness and sweetness of dis- 



112 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



position : and the subjects which they have 
chosen are, for the most part, those which 
were fitted for the display of this predominant 
expression ; — the Holy Family, the flight into 
Egypt, the youth of St. John, the penitence of 
the Magdalene. While, in common with all 
their brethren, they have aimed at the expres- 
sion of emotion, it was an emotion of a softer 
kind than that which arose from the energy 
of passion, or the violence of suffering; it was 
the emotion produced by more permanent 
feelings, and less turbulent affections; and 
from the character of this emotion, their exe- 
cution has assumed a peculiar cast, and their 
composition been governed by a peculiar 
principle. Their colouring is seldom brilliant ; 
there is a subdued tone pervading the greater 
part of their pictures; and they have limited 
themselves, in general, to the delineation of a 
single figure, or a small group, in which a 
single character of mind is prevalent. 

There are only six paintings by Salvator 
Rosa in this collection, but they bear that wild 
and original character which is proverbially 
known to belong to the works of this great 
artist. One of his pieces is particularly 
striking, a skirmish of horse, accompanied by 
all the scenery in which he so peculiarly de- 
lighted. In the foreground is the ruins of an 
old temple, with its lofty pillars finely displayed 
in shadow above the summits of the horizon; 
— in the middle distance the battle is dimly 
discerned through the driving rain, which ob- 
scures the view; while the back ground is 
closed by a vast ridge of gloomy rocks, rising 
into a dark and tempestuous sky. The cha- 
racter of the whole is that of sullen magnifi- 
cence ; and it affords a striking instance of the 
power of great genius, to mould the most 
varied objects in nature into the expression 
of one uniform poetical feeling. 

Very different is the expression which be- 
longs to the softer pictures of Correggio — of 
that great master, whose name is associated 
in every one's mind with all that is gentle or 
delicate in the imitation of nature. Perhaps 
it was from the force of this impression that 
his works seldom completely come up to the 
expectations which are formed of them. They 
are but eight in number, and do not compre- 
hend the finest of his compositions. Their 
general character is that of tenderness and 
delicacy: there is a softness in his shading of 
the human form which is quite unrivalled, and 
a harmony in the general tone of his colour- 
ing, which is in perfect unison with the cha- 
racteristic expression which it was his object 
to produce. There is a want of unity, how- 
ever, in the composition of his figures, which 
does not accord with this harmony of execu- 
tion ; you dwell rather on the fine expression 
of individual form, than the combined tendency 
of the whole group, and leave the picture with 
the impression of the beauty of a single coun- 
tenance, rather than the general character of 
the whole design. He has represented nature 
in its most engaging aspect, and given to in- 
dividual figures all the charms of ideal beauty ; 
but he wants that high strain of spiritual feel- 
ing, which belongs only to the works of Ra- 
phael. 



There is but one picture by Carlo Dolci in 
the Louvre ; but it alone is sufficient to mark 
the exquisite genius which its author pos- 
sessed. It is of small dimensions, and repre- 
sents the Holy Family, with the Saviour asleep. 
The finest character of design is here com- 
bined with the utmost delicacy of execution ; 
the softness of the shadows exceeds that of 
Correggio himself; and the dark-blue colour- 
ing which prevails over the whole, is in perfect 
unison with the expression of that rest and 
quiet which the subject requires. The sleep 
of the Infant is perfection itself — it is the deep 
sleep of youth and of innocence, which no 
care has disturbed, and no sorrow embittered 
— and in the unbroken repose of which the 
features have relaxed into the expression of 
perfect happiness. All the features of the 
picture are in unison with this expression, 
except in the tender anxiety of the virgin's 
eye; and all is at rest in the surrounding ob- 
jects, save where her hand gently removes the 
veil to contemplate the unrivalled beauty of the 
Saviour's countenance. 

Without the softness of shading or the har- 
mony of colour which Correggio possessed, 
the works of Raphael possess a higher cha- 
racter, and aim at the expression of a sublimer 
feeling than those of any other artist whom 
modern Europe has produced. Like all his 
brethren, he has often been misled from the 
real object of his art, and tried ; in the energy 
of passion, or the confused expression of 
varied figures, to multiply the effect which his 
composition might produce. Like all the rest, 
he has failed in effecting what the constitution 
of the human mind renders impossible, and in 
this very failure, warned every succeeding age 
of the vanity of the attempt which his tran- 
scendent genius was unable to effect. It is this 
fundamental error that destroys the effect, even 
of his finest pieces; it is this, combined with 
the unapproachable nature of the presence 
which it reveals, that has rendered the transfi- 
guration itself a chaos of genius rather than a 
model of ideal beauty ; nor will it be deemed 
a presumptuous excess, if such sentiments are 
expressed in regard to this great author, since 
it is from his own works alone that we have 
derived the means of appreciating his imper- 
fections. 

It is in his smaller pieces that the genuine 
character of Raphael's paintings is to be seen 
— in the figure of St. Michael subduing the 
demon ; in the beautiful tenderness of the 
Virgin and Child; in the unbroken harmony 
of the Holy Family ; in the wildness and 
piety of the infant St. John; — scenes, in which 
all the objects of the picture combine for the 
preservation of one uniform character, and 
where the native fineness of his mind appears 
undisturbed by the display of temporary pas- 
sion, or the painful distraction of varied suf- 
fering. 

There are no pictures of the English school 
in the Louvre, for the arms of France never 
prevailed in our island. From the splendid 
character, however, which it early assumed 
under the distinguished guidance of Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, and from the high and philosophical 
principles which he at first laid down for the 



THE LOUVRE IN 1814. 



113 



government of the art, there is every reason 
to believe that it ultimately will rival the cele- 
brity of foreign genius : And it is in this view 
that the continuance of the gallery of the 
Louvre, in its present situation, is principally 
to be wished by the English nation — that the 
English artists may possess so near their own 
country so great a school for composition and 
design ; that the imperfections of foreign 
schools may enlighten the views of English 
genius; and that the conquests of the French 
arms, by transferring the remains of ancient 
taste to these northern shores, may throw over 
its rising art that splendour which has hitherto 
been confined to the regions of the sun. 

The great object, therefore, of all the modern 
schools of historical painting, seems to have 
been the delineation of an affecting scene or in- 
teresting occurrence ; they have endeavoured to 
tell a story by the variety of incidents in a 
single picture; and seized, for the most part, 
the moment when passion was at its greatest 
height, or suffering appeared in its most ex- 
cruciating form. The general character, ac- 
cordingly, of the school, is the expression of 
passion or violent suffering; and in the pro- 
secution of this object, they have endeavoured 
to exhibit it under all its aspects, and display 
all the effects which it could possibly produce 
on the human form, by the different figures 
which they have introduced. While this is 
the general character of the whole, there are 
of course numerous exceptions; and many 
of its greatest painters seem, in the representa- 
tion of single figures, or in the composition 
of smaller groups, to have had in view the ex- 
pression of less turbulent affections; to have 
aimed at the display of settled emotion or per- 
manent feeling, and to have excluded every 
thing from their composition which was not 
in unison with this predominant expression. 

The Sculpture Gallery, which contains above 
two hundred remains of ancient statuary, marks 
in the most decided manner the different ob- 
jects to which this noble art was applied in 
ancient times. Unlike the paintings of modern 
Europe, their figures are almost uniformly at 
rest; they exclude passion or violent suffering 
from their design ; and the moment which they 
select is not that in which a particular or tran- 
sient emotion may be displayed, but in which 
the settled character of mind may be expressed. 
With the two exceptions of the Laocoon and 
the fighting Gladiator, there are none of the 
statues in the Louvre which are not the repre- 
sentation of the human figure in a state of 
repose ; and the expression which the finest 
possess, is invariably that permanent expres- 
sion which has resulted from the habitual 
frame and character of mind. Their figures 
seem to belong to a higher class of beings than 
that in which we are placed ; they indicate a 
state in which passion, anxiety, and emotion 
are no more ; and where the unruffled repose 
of mind has moulded the features into the per- 
fect expression of the mental character. Even 
the countenance of the Venus de Medicis, the 
most beautiful which it has ever entered into 
the mind of man to conceive, and of which no 
copy gives the slightest idea, bears no trace 
of emotion, and none of the marks of human 
15 



feeling; it is the settled expression of celestial 
beauty, and even the smile on her lip is not 
the fleeting smile of temporary joy, but the 
lasting expression of that heavenly feeling 
which sees in all around it the grace and love- 
liness which belongs to itself alone. It ap- 
proaches nearer to that character which some- 
times marks the countenance of female beauty 
when death has stilled the passions of the 
world ; but it is not the cold expression of past 
character which survives the period of mortal 
dissolution ; it is the living expression of pre- 
sent existence, radiant with the beams of im- 
mortal life, and breathing the air of eternal 
happiness. 

The paintings of Raphael convey the most 
perfect idea of earthly beauty ; and they de- 
note the expression of all that is finest and 
most elevated in the character of the female 
mind. But there is a "human meaning in 
their eye," and they bear the marks of that 
anxiety and tenderness which belong to the 
relations of present existence. The Venus 
displays the same beauty, freed from the cares 
which existence has produced; and her lifeless 
eye-balls gaze upon the multitude which sur- 
round her, as on a scene fraught only with the 
expression of universal joy. 

In another view, the Apollo and the Venus 
appear to have been intended by the genius 
of antiquity, as expressive of the character of 
mind which distinguishes the different sexes ; 
and in the expression of this character, they 
have exhausted all which it is possible for 
human imagination to produce upon the sub- 
ject. The commanding air, and advanced step 
of the Apollo, exhibit man in his noblest aspect, 
as triumphing over the evils of physical na- 
ture, and restraining the energy of his dispo- 
sition, in the consciousness of resistless power: 
the averted eye, and retiring grace of the Ve- 
nus, are expressive of the modesty, gentleness 
and submission, which form the most beauti- 
ful features of ihe female character. 

Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed, 
For valour lie, and contemplation, formed, 
For beauty She, and sweet attractive grace, 
He for God only, She for God in Him. 

These words were said of our first parents 
by our greatest poet, after the influence of a 
pure religion had developed the real nature of 
the female character, and determined the place 
which woman was to hold in the scale of na- 
ture ; but the idea had been expressed in a 
still finer manner two thousand years before, 
by the sculptors of antiquity; and amidst all 
ihe degradation of ancient manners, the pro- 
phetic genius of Grecian taste contemplated 
that ideal perfection in the character of the 
sexes, which was destined to form the boun- 
dary of human progress in the remotest ages 
of human improvement. 

The Apollo strikes a stranger with all its 
grandeur on the first aspect ; subsequent exa- 
mination can add nothing to the force of the 
impression which is then received. The Ve- 
nus produces at first less effect, but gains upon 
the mind at every renewal, till it rivets the 
affections even more than the greatness of its 
unequalled rival. 

The Dying Gladiator is perhaps, after the 
k2 



in 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



two which have been mentioned, the finest 
statue which the Louvre contains. The mo- 
ment chosen is finely adapted for the expres- 
sion of ideal beauty, from a subject connected 
with painful ideas. It is not the moment of 
energy or struggling, when the frame is con- 
vulsed with the exertion it is making, or the 
countenance is deformed by the tumult of pas- 
sion; it is the moment of expiring nature, 
when the figure is relaxed by the weakness of 
decay, and the mind is softened by the approach 
of death ; when the ferocity of combat is for- 
gotten in the extinction of the interest which 
it had excited, when every unsocial passion is 
stilled by the weakness of exhausted nature, 
and the mind, in the last moments of life, is 
fraught with finer feelings than had belonged 
to the character of previous existence. It is 
a moment similar to- that in which Tasso has 
so beautifully described the change in Clorin- 
da's mind, after she had been mortally wound- 
ed by the hand of Tancred, but in which he 
was enabled to give her the inspiration of a 
greater faith, and the charity of a more gentle 
religion : — 

Amico h'ai vinto : io te perdon. Perdona 
Tu ancora, al corpo no che nulla pave 
All' alma si: deli per lei prega ; e dona 
Battesmo a me, ch'ogni mia colpa lave; 
In queste voci languide risuona 
Un non so che di flebile e soave 
Ch' al cor gli scende, ed ogni sdegno ammorza, 
Egli occhi a lagrimar gP invoglia e sforza. 

The statues of antiquity were addressed to 
the multitude of the people ; they were intended 
to awaken the devotion of all classes of citi- 
zens — to be felt and judged by all mankind. 
They are free, therefore, from all the peculiar- 
ities of national taste ; they are purified from 
all the peculiarities of local circumstances ; 
they have been rescued from that miserable 
degradation to which art is uniformly exposed, 
by taste being confined to a limited society. 
They have assumed, in consequence, that ge- 
neral character, which might suit the universal 
feelings of our nature, and that permanent ex- 
pression which might speak to the heart of 
men through every succeeding age. The ad- 
miration, accordingly, for those works of art 
has been undiminished by the lapse of time; 
they excite the same feelings at the present 
time, as when they came fresh from the hand 
of the Grecian artist, and are regarded by all 
nations with the same veneration on the banks 
of the Seine, as when they sanctified the 
temples of Athens, or adorned the gardens of 
Rome. 

Even the rudest nations seem to have felt 
the force of this impression. The Hungarians 
and the Cossacks, during the stay of the allied 
armies in Paris, ignorant of the name or the 
celebrity of those works of art, seemed yet to 
take a delight in the survey of the statues 
of antiquity, and in passing through the long 
line of marbled greatness which the Louvre 
presents, stopt involuntarily at the sight of the 
Venus, or clustered round the foot of the pe- 
destal of the Apollo ; — indicating thus, in the 
expression of unaffected feeling, the force of 
that genuine taste for the beauty of nature, 
which all the rudeness of savage manners, and 
all the ferocity of war had not been able to de- 



' stroy. The poor Russian soldier, whose know- 
ledge of art was limited to the crucifix which 
I he had borne in his bosom from his native 
! land, still felt the power of ancient beauty, and 
I in the spirit of the Athenians, who erected an 
I altar to the Unknown God, did homage in si- 
lence to that unknown spirit which had touched 
a new chord in his untutored heart. 

The character of art in every country ap- 
pears to have been determined by the disposi- 
tion of the people to whom it was addressed, 
and the object of its composition to have va- 
ried with the purpose it was called on to fulfil. 
The Grecian statues were designed to excite 
the devotion of a cultivated people; to imbody 
their conceptions of divine perfection ; to real- 
ize the expression of that character of mind 
which they imputed to the deities whose tem- 
ples they were to adorn: it was grace, or 
strength, or majesty, or youthful power, which 
they were to represent by the figures of Venus, 
of Hercules, of Jupiter, or of Apollo. Their 
artists accordingly were led to aim at the ex- 
pression of general character : to exclude pas- 
sion, or emotion, or suffering, from their de- 
sign, and represent their figures in that state 
of repose where the permanent expression of 
mind ought to be displayed. It is perhaps in 
this circumstance that is to be found the cause 
both of the peculiarity and the excellence of 
the Grecian statuary. 

The Italian painters were early required to 
effect a different object. Their pictures were 
destined to represent the sufferings of nature ; to 
display the persecution or death of our Saviour, 
the anguish of the Holy Family, the heroism 
of martyrs, the resignation of devotion. In 
the infancy of the arts, accordingly, they were 
led to study the expression of passion, of 
suffering, and emotion ; to aim at rousing the 
pity, or exciting the sympathy of the spectators ; 
and to endeavour to characterize their paint- 
ings by the representation of temporary pas- 
sion, not the expression of permanent charac- 
ter. Those beautiful pictures in which a dif- 
ferent object seems to have been followed — in 
which the expression is that of permanent 
emotion, not transient passion, while they cap- 
tivate our admiration, seem to be exceptions 
from the general design, and to have been 
suggested by the peculiar nature of the subject 
represented, or a particular firmness of mind 
in the artist. In these causes we may perhaps 
discern the origin of the peculiar character 
of the Italian school. 

In the French school, the character and 
manners of the people seem to have carried 
this peculiarity to a still greater length. Their 
character led them to seek in every thing for 
stage effect ; to admire the most extravagant 
and violent representations, and to value the 
efforts of art, not in proportion to their imita- 
tion of the qualities of nature, but in propor- 
tion to their resemblance to those artificial 
qualities on which their admiration was 
founded. The vehemence of their manner, on 
the most ordinary occasions, rendered the 
most extravagant gestures requisite for the 
display of real passion ; and their drama ac- 
cordingly exhibits a mixture of dignity of sen- 
timent, with violence of gesture, beyond mea- 



THE LOUVRE IN 1814. 



115 



sure surprising to a foreign spectator. The 
same disposition of the people has influenced 
the character of their historical painting; and 
it is to be remembered, that the French school 
of painting succeeded the establishment of the 
French drama. It is hence that they have ge- 
nerally selected the moment of theatrical effect 
— the moment of phrcnzied passion, or unpa- 
ralleled exertion, and that their composition is 
distinguished by so many striking contrasts, 
and so laboured a display of momentary effect. 

The Flemish or Dutch school of painting 
was neither addressed to the devotional nor 
the theatrical feelings of mankind ; it was 
neither intended to awaken the sympathy of 
religious pity, nor excite the admiration of 
artificial dispositions — it was addressed to 
wealthy men of vulgar capacities, capable of 
appreciating only the merit of minute detail, 
or the faithfulness of exact imitation. It is 
hence that their painting possesses excellencies 
and defects of so peculiar a description ; that 
they have carried the minuteness of finishing 
to so unparalleled a degree of perfection ; that 
the brilliancy of their lights has thrown a 
splendour over the vulgarity of their subjects, 
and that they are in general so utterly destitute of 
all the refinement and sentiment which sprung 
from the devotional feelings of the Italian 
people. 

The subjects which the Dutch painters 
chose were subjects of low humour, calcu- 
lated to amuse a rich and uncultivated people: 
the subjects of the French school were heroic 
adventure, suited to the theatrical taste of a 
more elevated society: the subjects of the 
Italian school were the incidents of sacred 
history, suited to the devotional feelings of a 
religious people. In all, the subjects to which 
painting was applied, and the character of the 
art itself, was determined by the peculiar cir- 
cumstances or disposition of the people to 
whom it was addressed: so that, in these in- 
stances, there has really happened what Mr. 
Addison stated should ever be the case, that 
" the taste should not conform to the art, but 
the art to the taste." 

The object of statuary should ever be the 
same to which it was always confined by the 
ancients, viz. the representation of character. 
The very materials on which the sculptor has 
to operate, render his art unfit for the expres- 
sion either of emotion or passion; and the 
figure, when finished, can bear none of the 
marks by which they are to be distinguished. 
It is a figure of cold, and pale, and lifeless 
marble, without the varied colour which emo- 
tion produces, or the living eye which passion 
animates. The eye is the feature which is 
expressive of present emotion ; it is it which 
varies with all the changes which the mind 
undergoes; it is it which marks the difference 
between joy and sorrow, between love and 
hatred, between pleasure and pain, between 
life and death. But the eye, with all the end- 
less expressions which it bears, is lost to the 
sculptor; its gaze must ever be cold and life- 
less to him; its fire is quenched in the stillness 
of the tomb. A statue, therefore, can never be 
expressive of living emotion ; it can never ex- 
press those transient feelings which mark the 



play of the living mind. It is an abstraction 
of character which has no relation to present 
existence; a shadow in which all the perma- 
nent features of the mind are expressed, but 
none of the passions of the mind are shown : 
like the figures of snow, which the magic of 
Okba formed to charm the solitude of Leila's 
dwelling,«it bears the character of the human 
form, but melts at the warmth of human feeling. 
While such is the object to which statuary 
would appear to be destined, painting embraces 
a wider range, and is capable of more varied 
expression : it is expressive of the living form ; 
it paints the eye and opens the view of the 
present mind; it imitates all the fleeting changes 
which constitute the signs of present emotion. 
It is not, therefore, an abstraction of character 
which the painter is to represent; not an ideal 
form, expressive only of the qualities of per- 
manent character; but an actual being, alive 
to the impressions of present existence, and 
bound by the ties of present affection. It is in 
the delineation of these affections, therefore, 
that the power of the painter principally con- 
sists ; in the representation, not of simple cha- 
racter, but of character influenced or subdued 
by emotion. It is the representation of the joy 
of youth, or the repose of age ; of the sorrow 
of innocence, or the penitence of guilt; of the 
tenderness of parental affection, or the gra- 
titude of filial love. In these, and a thousand 
other instances, the expression of the emotion 
constitutes the beauty of the picture; it is that 
which gives the tone to the character which it 
is to bear ; it is that which strikes the chord 
which vibrates in every human heart. The 
object of the painter, therefore, is the ex- 
pression of emotion, of that emotion which 
is blended with the character of the mind 
which feels, and gives to that character the 
interest which belongs to the events of present 
existence. 

The object of the painter being the repre- 
sentation of emotion in all the varied situations 
which life produces, it follows, that every thing 
in his picture should be in unison with the 
predominant expression which he wishes it to 
bear; that the composition should be as sim- 
ple as is consistent with the development of 
this expression; and the colouring, such as 
accords with the character by which this emo- 
tion is distinguished. It is here that the genius 
of the artist is principally to be displayed, in 
the selection of such figures as suit the general 
impression which the whole is to produce; 
and the choice of such a tone of colouring, as 
harmonizes with the feeling of mind which it 
is his object to produce. The distraction of va- 
ried colours — the confusion of different figures — 
the contrast of opposite expressions, complete- 
ly destroy the effect of the composition ; they 
fix the mind to the observation of what is par- 
ticular in the separate parts, and prevent that 
uniform and general emotion which arises 
from the perception of one uniform expression 
in all the parts of which it is composed. It is 
in this very perception, however, that the source 
of the beauty is to be found ; it is in the unde- 
fined feeling to which it gives rise, that the 
delight of the emotion of taste consists. Like 
the harmony of sounds in musical composi- 



116 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



tion, it produces an effect, of which we are 
unable to give any account; but which we 
feel to be instantly destroyed by the jarring 
sound of a different note, or the discordant 
effect of a foreign expression. It is in the ne- 
glect of this great principle that the defect of 
many of the first pictures of modern times is 
to be found — in the confused multitude of un- 
necessary figures — in the contradictory ex- 
pression of separate parts — in the distracting 
brilliancy of gorgeous colours : in the laboured 
display, in short, of the power of the artist, and 
the utter dereliction of the object of the art. 
The great secret, on the other hand, of the 
beauty of the most exquisite specimens of mo- 
dern art, lies in the simplicity of expression 
which they bear, in their production of one 
uniform emotion, from all the parts of one 
harmonious composition. For the production 
of this unity of emotion the surest means Avill 
be found to consist in the selection of as few 
figures as is consistent with the development 
of the characteristic expression of the com- 
position ; and it is, perhaps, to this circum- 
stance, that we are to impute the unequalled 
charm which belongs to the pictures of single 
figures, or small groups, in which a single ex- 
pression is alone attempted. 

Both painting and sculpture are wholly 
unfit for the representation of passion, as 
expressed bt motion ; and that to attempt to 
delineate it, necessarily injures the effect of 
the composition. Neither, it is clear, can ex- 
press actual motion : they should not attempt, 
therefore, to represent those passions of the 
mind which motion alone is adequate to ex- 
press. The attempt to delineate violent 
passion, accordingly, uniformly produces a 
painful or a ridiculous effect: it does not 
even convey any conception of the passion 
itself, because its character is not known by 
the expression of any single moment, but by 
the rapid changes which result from the per- 
turbed state into which the mind is thrown. 
It is hence that passion seems so ridiculous 
when seen at a distance, or without the cause 
of its existence being known : and it is hence, 
that if a human figure were petrified in any 
of the stages of passion it would have so 
painful or insane an appearance. As painting, 
therefore, cannot exhibit the rapid changes 
in which the real expression of passion con- 
sists, it should not attempt its delineation at 
all. Its real object is, the expression of emotion, 
of that more settled state of the human mind 
when the changes of passion are gone — when 



the countenance is moulded into the expres- 
sion of permanent feeling, and the existence 
of this feeling is marked by the permanent 
expression which the features have assumed. 

The greatest artists of ancient and modern 
times, accordingly, have selected, even in the 
representation of violent exertion, that mo- 
ment of temporary repose, when a permanent 
expression is given to the figure. Even the 
Laocoon is not in a state of actual exertion: 
it is represented in that moment when the last 
effort has been made ; when straining against 
an invincible power has given to the figure 
the aspect at last of momentary repose ; and 
when despair has placed its settled mark on 
the expression of the countenance. The fight- 
ing Gladiator is not in a state of present acti- 
vity, but in that moment when he is preparing 
his mind for the future and final contest, and 
when, in this deep concentration of his 
powers, the pause which the genius of the 
artist has given, expresses more distinctly to 
the eye of the spectator the determined cha- 
racter of the combatant, than all that the 
struggle or agony of the combat itself could 
afterwards display. 

The Grecian statues in the Louvre may be 
considered as the most perfect works of 
human genius, and every one must feel those 
higher conceptions of human form, and of 
human nature, which the taste of ancient sta- 
tuary had formed. It is not in the moment of 
action that it has represented man, but in the 
moment after action, when the tumult of 
passion has ceased, and all that is great or 
dignified in moral nature remains. It is not 
Hercules in the moment of earthly combat, 
when every muscle was swollen with the 
strength he was exerting; but Hercules, in 
the moment of transformation into a nobler 
being, when the exertion of mortality has 
passed, and his powers seem to repose in the 
tranquillity of heaven ; not Apollo, when 
straining his youthful strength in drawing the 
bow; but Apollo, when the weapon was dis- 
charged, watching, with unexulting eye, its 
resistless course, and serene in the enjoy- 
ment of immortal power. And inspired by 
these mighty examples, it is not St. Michael 
when struggling with the demon, and marring 
the beauty of angelic form by the violence of 
earthly passion, that Raphael represents; but 
St. Michael, in the moment of unruffled tri- 
umph, restraining the might of almighty 
power, and radiant with the beams of eternal 
mercy. 



TYROL. 



117 



TYKOL/ 



It is a common observation, that the cha- 
racter of a people is in a great measure influ- 
enced by their local situation, and the nature 
of the scenery in which they are placed ; and 
it is impossible to visit the Tyrol without being 
convinced of the truth of the remark. The 
entrance of the mountain region is marked 
by as great a diversity in the aspect and man- 
ners of the population, as in the external 
objects with which they are surrounded ; nor 
is the transition, from the level plain of Lom- 
bardy to the rugged precipices of the Alps, 
greater than from the squalid crouching ap- 
pearance of the Italian peasant to the mar- 
tial air of the free-born mountaineer. 

This transition is so remarkable, that it 
attracts the attention of the most superficial 
observer. In travelling over the states of the 
north of Italy, he meets everywhere with the 
symptoms of poverty, meanness, and abject 
depression. The beautiful slopes which de- 
scend from the Alps, clothed with all that is 
beautiful and luxuriant in nature, are inha- 
bited for the most part by an indigent and 
squalid population, among whom you seek 
in vain for any share of that bounty with 
which Providence has blessed their country. 
The rich plains of Lombardy are cultivated 
by a peasantry whose condition is hardly 
superior to that of the Irish cottager; and 
while the effeminate proprietors of the soil 
waste their days in inglorious indolence at 
Milan and Verona, their unfortunate tenantry 
are exposed to the merciless rapacity of bai- 
liffs and stewards, intent only upon augment- 
ing the fortunes of their absent superiors. In 
towns, the symptoms of general distress are, 
if possible, still more apparent. While the 
opera and the Corso are crowded with splen- 
did equipages, the lower classes of the people 
are involved in hopeless indigence :— The 
churches and public streets are crowded with 
beggars, whose wretched appearance marks 
but too truly the reality of the distress of 
which they complain — while their abject and 
crouching manner indicates the entire politi- 
cal degradation to which they have so long 
been subjected. At Venice, in particular, the 
total stagnation of employment, and the misery 
of the people, strikes a stranger the more 
forcibly from the contrast which they afford 
to the unrivalled splendour of her edifices, 
and the glorious recollections with which her 
history is filled. As he admires the gorgeous 
magnificence of the piazza St. Marco, or winds 
through the noble palaces that still rise with 
undecaying beauty from the waters of the 
Adriatic, he no longer wonders at the astonish- 
ment with which the stern crusaders of the 
north gazed at her marble piles, and feels the 
rapture of the Roman emperor, when he ap- 
proached, "where Venice sat in state throned 
on her hundred isles ; " but in the mean and 

♦ Blackwood's Magazine, Sept. 1819. Written from 
notes made during a tour in Tyrol in the preceding year. 



pusillanimous race by which they are now 
inhabited, he looks in vain for the descendants 
of those great men who leapt from their 
gallies on the towers of Constantinople, and 
stood forth as the bulwark of Christendom 
against the Ottoman power; and still less, 
when he surveys the miserable population 
with which he is surrounded, can he go back 
in imagination to those days of liberty and 
valour, when 

" Venire once was dear. 

The pleasant place of all festivity, 

The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy." 

From such scenes of national distress, and 
from the melancholy spectacle of despotic 
power ruling in the abode of ancient freedom, 
it is with delight that the traveller enters the 
fastnesses of the Alps, where liberty has im- 
printed itself in indelible characters on the 
character and manners of the people. In 
every part of the Tyrol the bold and martial 
air of the peasantry, their athletic form and 
fearless eye, bespeak the freedom and inde- 
pendence which they have enjoyed. In most 
instances the people go armed; and during 
the summer and autumn they wear a musket 
hung over their shoulders, or some other of- 
fensive weapon. Universally they possess 
offensive weapons and are trained early to the 
use of them, both by the expeditions in search 
of game, of which they are passionately fond 
— and by the annual duty of serving in the 
trained bands, to which every man capable of 
bearing arms is, without exception, subjected. 
It was in consequence of this circumstance, 
in a great measure, that they were able to 
make so vigorous a resistance, with so little 
preparation, to the French invasion; and it is 
to the same cause that is chiefly to be ascribed 
that intrepid and martial air by which they are 
distinguished from almost every other peasant- 
ry in Europe. 

Their dress is singularly calculated to add to 
this impression. That of the men consists, 
for the most part, of a broad-brimmed hat, 
ornamented by a feather; a jacket light to the 
shape, with a "broad girdle, richly ornamented, 
fastened in front by a large buckle of costly 
workmanship; black leather breeches and 
gaiters, supported over the shoulders by two 
broad bands, generally of scarlet or blue, 
which are joined in front by a cross belt of 
the same colour. They frequently wear pis- 
tols in their girdle, and have either a rifle or 
cloak slung over their shoulders. The colours 
of the dresses vary in the different parts of 
the country, as they do in the cantons of Swit- 
zerland; but they are always of brilliant 
colours, and ornamented, particularly round 
the breast, with a degree of richness which 
appears extraordinary in the labouring classes 
of the community. Their girdles and clasps, 
with the other more costly parts of their cloth- 
ing, are handed down from generation to 
generation, and worn on Sundays and festi- 



118 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



vals, with scrupulous care, by the great-grand- 
sons of those by whom they were originally 
purchased. 

The dress of the women is grotesque and 
singular in the extreme. Generally speaking, 
the waists are worn long, and the petticoats 
exceedingly short; and the colours of their 
clothes are as bright and various as those of 
the men. To persons habituated however to 
the easy and flowing attire of our own coun- 
trywomen, the form and style of this dress 
appears particularly unbecoming; nor can we 
altogether divest ourselves of those ideas of 
ridicule which we are accustomed to attach to 
such antiquated forms, both on the stage and 
in the pictures of the last generation. Among 
the peasant girls, you often meet with much 
beauty; but, for the most part, the women of 
the Tyrol are not nearly so striking as the 
men; an observation which seems applicable 
to most mountainous countries, and to none 
more than to the West Highlands of Scotland. 
It is of more importance to observe that the 
Tyrolese peasantry are everywhere courteous 
and pleasing in their demeanor, both towards 
strangers and their own countrymen. In this 
respect, their manners have sometimes been 
misrepresented. If a traveller addresses them 
in a style of insolence or reproach, which is too 
often used towards the lower orders in France 
or Italy, he will in all probability meet with a 
repulse, and if the insult is carried further, he 
may, perhaps, have cause permanently to re- 
pent the indiscretion of his language. For the 
Tyrolese are a free people; and though sub- 
ject to a despotic government, their own state 
preserves its liberty as entire as if it acknow- 
ledged no superior to its own authority. The 
peasantry too are of a keen and enthusiastic 
temper; grateful to the last degree for kind- 
ness or condescension, but feelingly alive on 
the other hand to any thing like contempt or 
derision in the manner of their superiors. 
Dwelling too in a country where all are equal, 
and where few noble families or great proprie- 
tors are to be found, they are little accustomed 
to brook insults of any kind, or to submit to 
language from strangers which they would 
not tolerate from their own countrymen. A 
similar temper of mind may be observed 
among the Scotch Highlanders; it has been 
noticed in the mountains of Nepaul and Cabul, 
and has long characterized the Arabian tribes ; 
and indeed it belongs generally to all classes 
of the people in those situations where the 
debasing effects of the progress of wealth, and 
the division of labour have not been felt, and 
where, from whatever causes, the individuals 
in the lower ranks of life are called into active 
and strenuous exertion, and compelled to act 
for themselves in the conduct of life. 

If a stranger, however, behaves towards the 
Tyrolese peasantry with the ordinary courtesy 
with which an Englishman is accustomed to 
address the people of his own country, there 
is no part of the world in which he will meet 
with a more cordial reception, or where he will 
find a more affectionate or grateful return for 
the smallest acts of kindness. Among these 



more civilized states, the result of any habitual 
awe for their rank, or of any selfish considera- 
tion of the advantage to be derived from culti- 
vating their good will. It is the spontane- 
ous effusion of benevolent feeling, of feeling 
springing from the uncorrupted dictates of their 
hearts, and enhanced by the feudal attachment 
with which they naturally are inclined to re- 
gard those in a higher rank than themselves. 
Though the Tyrolese are entirely free, and 
though the emperor possesses but a nominal 
sovereignty over them, yet the warm feelings 
of feudal fidelity have nowhere maintained 
their place so inviolate as among their moun- 
tains; and this feeling of feudal respect and 
affection is extended by them to the higher 
classes, whenever they behave towards them 
with any thing like kindness or gentleness of 
manners. It has arisen from the peculiar 
situation of their country, in which there are 
few of the higher orders, where the peasantry 
possess almost the entire land of which it 
consists, and where, at the same time, the 
bonds of feudal attachment have been preserved 
with scrupulous care, for political reasons, by 
their indulgent government, that the peasantry 
have united the independence and pride of re- 
publican states with the devoted and romantic 
fidelity to their sovereign, which characterizes 
the inhabitants of monarchical realms. Like 
the peasants of Switzerland, they regard them- 
selves as composing the state, and would dis- 
dain to crouch before any other power. Like 
the Highlanders of Scotland, they are actuated 
by the warmest and most enthusiastic loyalty 
towards their sovereign, and like them they 
have not scrupled on many occasions to ex- 
pose their lives and fortunes in a doubtful and 
often hopeless struggle in his cause. From 
these causes has arisen, that singular mixture 
of loyalty and independence, of stubbornness 
and courtesy, of republican pride and chival- 
rous fidelity, by which their character is dis- 
tinguished from that of every other people in 
Europe. 

Honesty may be regarded as a leading fea- 
ture in the character of the Tyrolese, as indeed 
it is of all the German people. In no situation 
and under no circumstances is a stranger in 
danger of being deceived by them- They will, 
in many instances, sacrifice their own in- 
terests rather than betray what they consider so 
sacred a duty as that of preserving inviolate 
their faith with foreigners. In this respect 
their conduct affords a very striking contrast 
to the conduct of the French and Italians, 
whose rapacity and meanness have long been 
observed and commented on by every traveller. 
Yet, amidst all our indignation at that charac- 
ter, it may well be doubted, whether it does not 
arise naturally and inevitably from the system 
of government to which they have had the 
misfortune to be subjected. Honesty is avirtue 
practised and esteemed among men who have 
a character to support, and who feel their own 
importance in the scale of society. Generally 
it will be found to prevail in proportion to the 
weight which is attached to individual charac- 
ter ; that is, to the freedom which the people 



untutored people, the gratitude for any good enjoy. Cheating, on the other hand, is the 
deed on the part of their superiors, is not, as in | usual and obvious resource of slaves, of men 



TYROL. 



119 



who have never been taught to respect them- 
selves, and whose personal qualities are en- 
tirely overlooked by the higher orders of the 
state. If England and Switzerland and the 
Tyrol had been subjected by any train of un- 
fortunate events to the same despotism which 
nas degraded the character of the lower orders 
in France and Italy, they would probably have 
had as little reason as their more servile neigh- 
bours to have prided themselves on the honesty 
and integrity of their national character. 

Perhaps the most remarkable feature in the 
character of the Tyrolese, is their uniform 
piety, a feeling which is nowhere so univer- 
sally diffused as among their sequestered val- 
leys. The most cursory view of the country 
is sufficient to demonstrate the strong hold 
which religion has taken of the minds of the 
peasantry. Chapels are built almost at every 
half mile on the principal roads, in which the 
passenger may perform his devotions, or which 
may awaken the thoughtless mind to a recol- 
lection of its religious duties. The rude efforts 
of art have there been exerted to pourtray the 
leading events in our Saviour's life; and in- 
numerable figures, carved in wood, attest, in 
every part of the country, both the barbarous 
taste of the people, and the fervour of their 
religious impressions. Even in the higher 
parts of the mountains, where hardly any ves- 
tiges of human cultivation are to be found, in 
the depth of untrodden forests, or on the sum- 
mit of seemingly inaccessible cliffs, the symbols 
of devotion are to be found, and the cross rises 
everywhere amidst the wilderness, as if to 
mark the triumph of Christianity over the 
greatest obstacles of nature. Nor is it only in 
solitudes or deserts that the vestiges of their 
devotion are to be found. In the valleys and 
in the cities it still preserves its ancient sway 
over the people. On the exterior of most 
houses the legend of some favourite saint, or 
the sufferings of some popular martyr, are to 
be found ; and the poor inhabitant thinks him- 
self secure from the greater evils of life under 
the guardianship of their heavenly aid. In 
every valley numerous spires are to be seen 
rising amidst the beauty of the surrounding 
scene, and reminding the traveller of the piety 
of its simple inhabitants. On Sunday the whole 
people flock to church in their neatest and 
gayest attire ; and so great is the number who 
thus frequent these places of worship, that it 
is not unfrequent to see the peasants kneeling 
on the turf in the churchyard where mass is 
performed, from being unable to find a place 
within its walls. Regularly in the evening 
prayers are read in every family; and the 
traveller who passes through the villages at 
the hour of twilight, often sees through their 
latticed windows the young and the old kneel- 
ing together round their humble fire, or is 
warned of his approach to human habitation, by 
hearing their evening hymns stealing through 
the silence and solitude of the forest. 

Nor is their devotion confined to acts of 
external homage, or the observance of an un- 
meaning ceremony. Debased as their religion 
is by the absurdities and errors of the Catholic 
form of worship, and mixed up as it is with in- 
numerable legends and visionary tales, it yet 



preserves enough of the pure spirit of its divine 
origin to influence, in a great degree, the con- 
duct of their private lives. The Tyrolese have 
not yet learned that immorality in private life 
may be pardoned by the observance of certain 
ceremonies, or that the profession of faith 
purchases a dispensation from the rules of 
obedience. These, the natural and the usual 
attendants of the Catholic faith in richer states, 
have not reached their poor and sequestered 
valleys. The purchase of absolution by money 
is there almost unknown. In no part of the 
world are the domestic or conjugal duties 
more strictly or faithfully observed: and in 
none do the parish priests exercise a stricter 
or more conscientious control over the conduct 
of their flock. Their influence is not weakened, 
as in a more advanced state of society, by a 
discordance of religious tenets; nor is the con- 
sideration due to this sacred function, lost in 
the homage paid to rank, or opulence, or power. 
Placed in the midst of a people who acknow- 
ledge no superiors, and who live almost univer- 
sally from the produce of their little domains, 
and strangers alike to the arts of luxury, and 
the seductions of fashion, the parish-priest is 
equally removed from temptation himself, 
and relieved from guarding against the great 
sources of wickedness in others. He is at 
once the priest, and the judge of his parish; 
the infallible criterion in matters of faith, and 
the umpire, in the occasional disputes which 
happen among them. Hence has arisen that re- 
markable veneration for their spiritual guides, 
by which the peasantry are distinguished; and 
it is to this cause that we are to ascribe the 
singular fact that their priests were their prin- 
cipal leaders in the war with France, and that 
while their nobles almost universally kept 
back, the people followed with alacrity the call 
of their pastors, to take up arms in support of 
the Austrian cause. 

In one great virtue, the peasants in this 
country (in common it must be owned with 
most Catholic states) are particularly worthy 
of imitation. The virtue of charity, which is 
too much overlooked in many Protestant 
kingdoms, but which the Catholic religion so 
uniformly and sedulously enjoins, is there 
practised, to the greatest degree, and by all 
classes of the people. Perhaps there are few 
countries in which, owing to the absence of 
manufactures and great towns, poverty ap- 
pears so rarely, or in which the great body of 
the people live so universally in a state of 
comfort. Yet, whenever wretchedness does ap- 
pear, it meets with immediate and effectual 
relief. Nor is their charity confined to actual 
mendicants, but extends to all whom accident 
or misfortune has involved in casual distress. 
Each valley supports its own poor; and the 
little store of every cottage, like the meal of 
the Irish cottager, is always open to any one 
who really requires its assistance. This be- 
nevolent disposition springs, no doubt, in a 
great measure from the simple state in which 
society exists among these remote districts; 
but it is to be ascribed not less to the efforts 
of the clergy, who incessantly enjoin this great 
Christian duty, and point it out as the chief 
means of atoning for past transgressions. 



120 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Much as we may lament the errors of the 
Catholic, and clearly as we may see its ten- 
dency (at least in its more corrupt forms) to 
nourish private immorality, and extinguish 
civil liberty, it is yet impossible to deny, that, 
in the great duty of Christian charity, which 
it invariably enjoins, it has atoned for a multi- 
tude of sins ; and to suspect that amidst the 
austerity and severity of the presbyterian dis- 
cipline, we have too much lost sight of the 
charity of the gospel; and that with us a pre- 
tended indignation for the vices which involve 
so many of the poor in distress, too often serves 
as a pretext for refusing to minister that relief 
to which, from whatever cause it has arisen, 
our Saviour tells us that it is entitled. 

There is something singularly delightful in 
the sway which religion thus maintains in 
these savage and sequestered regions. In 
ancient times, we are informed these moun- 
tains were inhabited by the Rhaetiams, the 
fiercest and most barbarous of the tribes, 
who dwelt in the fastnesses of the mountains, 
and of whose savage manners Livy has given 
so striking an account in his description of 
Hannibal's passage of the Alps. Many Roman 
legions were impeded in their progress, or 
thinned of their numbers, by these cruel bar- 
barians ; and even after they were reduced to 
subjection, by the expedition of Drusus, it was 
still esteemed a service of the utmost danger to 
leave the high road, or explore the remote re- 
cesses of the country. Hence the singular fact, 
almost incredible in modern times, that even 
in the days of Pliny, several hundred ) r ears 
after the first passage of these mountains by 
the Roman troops, the source of both the Rhine 
and the Iser were unknown ; and that the na- 
turalist of Rome was content to state, a century 
after the establishment of a Roman station at 
Sion, that the Rhone took its rise " in the most 
hidden parts of the earth, in the region of per- 
petual night, amidst forests for ever inacces- 
sible to human approach." Hence it is too, 
that almost all the inscriptions on the votive 
offerings which have been discovered in the 
ruins of the temple of Jupiter Pennimfs, at the 
summit of the great St. Bernard, and many of 
which come down to a late period in the history 
of the empire, speak of the gratitude of the pas- 
sengers for having escaped the extraordinary 
perils of the journey. The Roman authors al- 
ways speak of the Alps with expressions of dis- 
may and horror, as the scenes of only winter and 
desolation, and as the abodes of barbarous tribes. 
"Nives ccelo prope immistce, tecta informia im- 
posita rupibus pecora jumenta que torrida fri- 
gore homines intonsi etinculti.animalia inani- 
maque omnia rigentia gelu cetera visu quam 
dictu foediora terrorem renovarunt."* No at- 
tempt accordingly appears to have been made 
by any of the Romans in later times to explore 
the remoter recesses of the mountains now so 
familiar to every traveller; but while the empe- 
rors constructed magnificent highways across 
their summits to connect Italy with the northern 
provinces of the empire, they suffered the val- 
leys on either side to remain in their pristine 
state of barbarism, and hastened into remoter 



* Liv. lib. 21. 



districts to spread the cultivation of which the 
Alps, with their savage inhabitants, seemed to 
them incapable. 

What is it then which has wrought so won- 
derful a change in the manners, the habits, 
and the condition of the inhabitants of those 
desolate regions ] What is it which has spread 
cultivation through wastes, deemed in ancient 
times inaccessible to human improvement, and 
humanized the manners of a people remarkable 
only, under the Roman sway, for the ferocity 
and barbarism of their institutions? From 
what cause has it happened that those savage 
mountaineers, who resisted all the acts of civi- 
lization by which the Romans established their 
sway over mankind, and continued, even to the 
overthrow of the empire, impervious to all the 
efforts of ancient improvement, should, in later 
times, have so entirely changed their charac- 
ter, and have appeared, even from the first 
dawn of modern civilization, mild and humane 
in their character and mnnners? From what 
but from the influence of Religion — of that re- 
ligion which calmed the savage feelings of the 
human mind, and spread its beneficial in- 
fluence among the remotest habitations of men; 
and which prompted its disciples to leave the 
luxuries and comforts of southern climates, to 
diffuse knowledge and humanity through in- 
hospitable realms, and spread, even amidst the 
regions of winter and desolation, the light and 
the blessings of a spiritual faith. 

Universally it has been observed through- 
out the whole extent of the Alps, that the 
earliest vestiges of civilization, and the first 
traces of order and industry which appeared 
after the overthrow of the Roman empire, were 
to be found in the immediate neighbourhood 
of the religious establishments; and it is to 
the unceasing efforts of the clergy during the 
centuries of barbarism which followed that 
event, that the judicious historian of Switzer- 
land ascribes the early civilization and hu- 
mane disposition of the Helvetic tribes.* Placed 
as we are at a distance from the time when 
this great change was effected, and accustomed 
to manners in which its influence has long 
ago been established, we can hardly conceive 
the difficulties with which the earlier profess- 
ors of our faith had to struggle in subduing 
the cruel propensities, and calming the re- 
vengeful passions, that subsisted among the 
barbarous tribes who had conquered Europe; 
nor would we, perhaps, be inclined to credit 
the accounts of the heroic sacrifices which 
were then made by numbers of great and good 
men who devoted themselves to the conver- 
sion of the Alpine tribes, did not their institu- 
tions remain to this day as a monument of 
their virtue; and did we not still see a number 
of benevolent men who seclude themselves 
from the world, and dwell in the regions of 
perpetual snow, in the hope of rescuing a few 
individuals from a miserable death. When 
the traveller on the summit of the St. Bernard 
reads the warm and touching expressions of 
gratitude with which the Roman travellers re- 
corded in the temple of Jupiter their gratitude 
for having escaped the dangers of the pass, 



* Planta, vol. i. p. 17, &c. 



TYROL. 



121 



even in the days of Adrian and the Antonines, 
and reflects on the perfect safety with which 
he can now traverse the remotest recesses of 
the Alps, he will think with thankfulness of 
'he religion by which this wonderful change 
has been effected, and with veneration of the 
saint whose name has for a thousand years 
been affixed to the pass where his influence 
first reclaimed the people from their barbarous 
life ; and in crossing the defile of Mount Bren- 
ner, where the abbey of Wilten first offered 
an asylum to the pilgrim, he will feel, with a 
late eloquent and amiable writer, how fortunate 
it is "that religion has penetrated these fast- 
nesses, impervious to human power, and spread 
her influence over solitudes where human laws 
are of no avail ; that where precaution is impos- 
sible and resistance useless, she spreads her in- 
visible oegis over the traveller, and conducts 
him secure under her protection through all the 
dangers of his way. When, in such situations, 
he reflects upon his security, and recollects 
that these mountains, so savage and so well 
adapted to the purposes of murderers and 
banditti, have not, in the memory of man, 
been stained with human blood, he ought to 
do justice to the cause, and gratefully acknow- 
ledge the beneficial influence of religion. Im- 
pressed with these reflections, he will behold, 
with indulgence, perhaps even with interest, 
the crosses which frequently mark the brow of 
a precipice, and the little chapels hollowed out 
of the rock where the road is narrowed ; he 
will consider them as so many pledges of se- 
curity; and rest assured, that, as long as the 
pious mountaineer continues to adore the 
'Good Shepherd,' and to beg the prayer of the 
'afflicted mother,' he will never cease to be- 
friend the traveller, nor to discharge the duties 
of hospitality."* 

It must be admitted, at the same time, 
that the Tyrolese are in the greatest degree 
superstitious, and that their devotion, warm 
and enthusiastic as it is, is frequently mis- 
placed in the object of its worship. There is 
probably no country in which the belief in 
supernatural powers, in the gift of prophecy 
to particular individuals, and the agency of 
spiritual beings in human affairs, is more uni- 
versally established. It forms, indeed, part of 
their religious creed, and blends in the most 
singular manner with the legendary tales and 
romantic adventures which they have attached 
to the history of their saints. But we would 
err most egregiously, if we imagined that this 
superstition with which the whole people are 
tinged, savours at all of a weak or timid dis- 
position, or that it is any indication of a de- 
graded national character. It partakes of the 
savage character of the scenery in which they 
dwell, and is ennobled by the generous senti- 
ments which prevail among the lowest classes 
of the people. The same men who imagine 
that they see the crucifix bend its head in the 
dusk of the evening, and who hear the rattle 
of arms amid the solitude of the mountains, 
are fearless of death when it approaches them 
through the agency of human power. It is a 
strong feeling of religion, and a disposition to 



see, in all the events by which they are sur- 
rounded, the marks of divine protection, which 
is the foundation of their superstition; and the 
more strongly that they feel reliance on spi- 
ritual interposition, the less inclined are they 
to sink under the reverses of a temporary 
life. 

There is a wide distinction between superstir 
Hon and the belief in sorcery or witchcraft. 
The latter is the growth of weakness and 
credulity, and prevails most among men of a 
timid disposition, or among ignorant and bar- 
barous nations. The former, though it is 
founded on ignorance, and yields to the ex- 
perience and knowledge of mankind, yet 
springs from the noblest principles of our 
nature, and is allied to every thing by which 
the history of our species has been dignified 
in former times. It will not be pretended, that 
the Grecian states were deficient either in 
splendour of talents or heroism of conduct, 
yet superstition, in its grossest form, attached 
itself to all their thoughts, and influenced alike 
the measures of their statesmen and the dreams 
of their philosophers. The Roman writers 
placed in that very feeling which we would 
call superstition, the most honourable charac- 
teristic of their people, and ascribed to it the 
memorable series of triumphs by which the 
history of the republic was distinguished. 
" Nulla inquam republii aut major aut sanctior 
fuit," says Livy; and it is to their deep sense 
of religion that Cicero imputes the unparalleled 
success with which the arms of the republic 
were attended.* Yet the religious feeling which 
was so intimately blended with the Roman 
character, and which guided the actions and 
formed the minds of the great men who adorned 
her history, was for the most part little else than 
that firm reliance on the special interposition 
of Providence, which is the origin of supersti- 
tion. The Saracens, during the wars which 
followed the introduction of the Mohammedan 
faith, were superstitious to the highest degree, 
yet with how many brilliant and glorious qua- 
lities was their character distinguished, when 
they triumphantly carried the Crescent of 
Mohammed from the snows of the Himmaleh to 
the shores of the Atlantic. The crusaders even 
of the highest rank, believed firmly in the mi- 
racles and prophecies which were said to 
have accompanied the march of the Christian 
army; nor is it perhaps possible to find in 
history an example of such extraordinary con- 
sequences as followed the supposed discovery 
of the Holy Lance in the siege of Antioch; yet 
who will deny to these great men the praise 
of heroic enterprise and noble manners? 
Human nature has nowhere appeared in such 
glorious colours as in the Jerusalem Delivered 
of Tasso, where the firmness and constancy 
of the Roman patriot is blended with the 
courtesy of chivalrous manners, and the ex- 
alted piety of Christian faith ; yet supersti- 
tion formed a part of the character of all his 
heroes; the courage of Tancred failed when 
he heard the voice of Clorinda in the charmed 
tree ; and the bravest of his comrades trembled 
when they entered the enchanted forest, wheie 



* Eustace, i. 
16 



* Liv. lib. i. ; Cic. de Off. lib. i. c. 11. 
L 



122 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



"Esce all hor de la splva un suori reponte, 
Che par riinbombo <1i terren che tmne, 
EM inormorar degli Au^tri in Ini si seme, 
E'l pianto il'onda, che fra scogli genie." 

Examples of this kind may teach us, that 
although superstition in the age and among the 
society in which we live is the mark of a feeble 
mind, yet that in less enlightened ages or parts 
of the world, it is the mark only of an ardent 
and enthusiastic disposition, such as is the 
foundation of every thing that is great or 
generous in character, or elevated and spiritual 
in feeling. A people, in fact, strongly impressed 
' with religious feeling, and to whom experi- 
ence has not taught the means by which Pro- 
vidence acts in human affairs, must be supersti- 
tious; for it is the universal propensity of un- 
instructed man, to imagine that a special in- 
terposition of the Deity is necessary to accom- 
plish the manifestation of his will, or the ac- 
complishment of his purposes in human affairs. 
Nor is there anything impossible or absurd 
in such a supposition. It might have been, 
that future events were to be revealed on par- 
ticular occasions to mankind, as they were 
during the days of ancient prophecy, and that 
the course of human events was to be main- 
tained by special interpositions of divine power. 
Experience alone teaches us, that this is not 
the case ; it alone shows, that the intentions 
of Providence are carried into effect through 
the intervention of human agents, and that 
the laws of the moral world work out their 
own accomplishment by the voluntary acts 
of free agents. When we see how difficult it 
is to make persons even of cultivated under- 
standing comprehend this subject even in the 
present age, and with all the experience which 
former times have furnished, we may cease 
to wonder at the superstition which prevails 
among the peasants of the Tyrol; we may 
believe, that situated as they are, it is the na- 
tural effusion of a pious spirit untaught by the 
experience of other ages ; and we may discern, 
in the extravagancies of their legendary creed, 
not less than in the sublime piety of Newton, 
the operation of those common laws by which 
man is bound to his Creator. 

The scenery of Tyrol, and of the adjacent 
provinces of Styria and Carinthia, is singular- 
ly adapted to nourish romantic and supersti- 
tious ideas among the peasantry. In every 
part of the world the grandeur of mountain 
scenery has been found to be the prolific parent 
of superstition. It was the mists, and the blue 
lakes, and the sounding cataracts of Caledonia, 
which gave birth to the sublime but gloomy 
dreams of Ossian. The same cause has 
operated to a still greater degree among the 
Alps of Tyrol. The sublimity of the objects 
with which man is there surrounded — the 
resistless power of the elements which he 
finds continually in action — the utter insig- 
nificance of his own species, when compared 
with the gigantic objects in which he is placed, 
conspire to produce that distrust of himself, 
and that disposition to cling to higher powers, 
which is the foundation of superstitious feel- 
ing. In cities and in plains, the labour of 
man effaces in a certain degree these impres- 
sions ; the works which he has there accumu- 



lated, come to withdraw the attention from the 
distant magnificence of nature; while the 
weakness of the individual is forgotten in the 
aggregate force of numbers, or in the distrac- 
tions of civilized life. But amidst the solitude 
of the Alps no such change can take place. 
The greatest works of man appear there as 
nothing amidst the stupendous objects of na- 
ture; the distractions of artificial society are 
unknown amongst its simple inhabitants; and 
the individual is left in solitude to receive the im- 
pressions which the sublime scenery in which 
he is placed is fitted to produce. Upon minds 
so circumstanced the changes of external na- 
ture come to be considered as the immediate 
work of some invisible power; the shadows 
that fall in the lakes at sunrise, are interpreted 
as the indication of the approach of hostile 
bands — the howl of the winds through the 
forests is thought to be the lamentations of the 
dead, who are expiating their sins — and the 
mists that flit over the summits of the moun- 
tains, seem to be the distant skirts of vast 
armies borne in the whirlwind, and treading 
in the storm. 

The Gothic ruins with which the Tyrol is 
filled, contribute in a remarkable manner to 
keep alive these superstitious feelings. In 
many of the valhys old castles of vast dimen- 
sions are perched on the summit of lofty crags, 
or raise their mouldering towers high on the 
mountains above the aged forests with which 
they are surrounded. These casties, once the 
abode of feudal power, have long since been 
abandoned, or have gradually gone to decay, 
without being actually dismantled by the pro- 
prietors. With all of them the people connect 
some romantic or terrible exploit ; and the 
bloody deeds of feudal anarchy are remem- 
bered with terror by the peasants who dwell 
in the villages at their feet. Lights are often 
observed at night in towers which have been 
uninhabited for centuries ; and bloody figures 
have been distinctly seen to flit through their 
deserted halls. The armour which still hangs 
on the walls in many of the greater castles, 
has been observed to move, and the plumes 
to wave, when the Tyrolese army Avere victo- 
rious in war. Groans are still heard in the 
neighbourhood of the dungeons where the vic- 
tims of feudal tyranny were formerly slain ; 
and the cruel baron, who persecuted his peo- 
ple in his savage passion for the chase, is 
often heard to shriek in the forests of the 
Unterberg, and to howl as he flies from the 
dogs, whom he had trained to the scent of 
human blood. 

Superstitions, too, of a gentler and more holy 
kind, have arisen from the devout feelings of 
the people, and the associations connected Avith 
particular spots where persons of extraordi- 
nary sanctity have dwelt. In many of the 
farthest recesses of the mountains, on the A r erge 
of perpetual desolation, hermits in former times 
fixed their abode ; and the imagination of the 
peasants still fancies that their spirits hover 
around the spot where their earthly trials were 
endured. Shepherds who have passed in the 
gloom of the evening by the cell where the 
bones of a saint are laid, relate that they dis- 
tinctly heard his voice as he repeated his 



TYROL. 



evening prayers, and saw his form as he knelt 
before the crucifix which the piety of succeed- 
ing ages had erected in his hermitage. The 
image of many a patron saint has been seen 
to shed tears, when a reverse has happened to 
the Tyrolese arms ; and the garlands which 
are hung round the crosses of the Virgin wither 
when the hand which raised them has fallen 
in battle. Peasants who have been driven by 
a storm to take shelter in the little chapels 
which are scattered over the country, have 
seen the crucifix bow its head; and solemn 
music is heard at the hour of vespers, in the 
higher chapels of the mountains. The distant 
pealing of the organ, and the chant of innu- 
merable voices is there distinctly perceptible ; 
and the peasant, when returning at night from 
the chase, often trembles when he beholds fu- 
nereal processions, clothed in white, marching 
in silence through the gloom of the forests, or 
slowly moving on the clouds that float over 
the summit of the mountains. 

A country so circumstanced, abounding with 
every thing that is grand and beautiful in na- 
tural scenery, filled with Gothic castles, over 
which ruin has long ago thrown her softening 
hand, peopled by the phantoms of an extrava- 
gant yet sublime superstition, and still inha- 
bited by a valiant and enthusiastic people, 
seems of all others to be the fit theatre of poeti- 
cal fancy. It is truly extraordinary therefore, 
that no poet has appeared to glean the legends 
and ballads that are scattered through this in- 
teresting country, to perpetuate the aerial beings 
with which superstition has filled its wilds, 
and to dignify its mouldering castles with the 
recital of the many heroic and romantic ad- 
ventures which have occurred within their 
walls. When we recollect the unparalleled 
interest which the genius of the present day 
has given to the traditions and the character 
of the Scottish people, it is impossible not to 
regret, that no kindred mind has immortalized 
the still more wild and touching incidents that 
have occurred amidst the heroic inhabitants 
and sublime scenery of the Tyrol Alps. Let 
us hope, that the military despotism of Austria 
will not long continue to smother the genius, 
by restraining the freedom of those higher 
classes of her people where poetical talents are 
to be found; and that, before the present tra- 
ditions are forgotten, or the enthusiasm which 
the war has excited is subsided, there may yet 
arise the Scott of the south of Europe. 

The great circumstance which distinguishes 
the Tyrolese from their neighbours, the Swiss, 
to whom in many respects they bear a close 
resemblance, is in the animation and cheerful- 
ness of their character. The Swiss are by na- 
ture a grave and heavy people ; nor is this pe- 
culiar character the result of their republican 
institutions, for we are told by Planta, that their 
stupidity had become proverbial in France be- 
fore the time of their republic. The Tyrolese, 
on the other hand, are a cheerful and lively 
people, full of fire and animation, enthusiasti- 
cally devoted to their favourite pursuits, and 
extremely warm in their resentments. Public 
games are frequent in every valley ; and the 
keen penetrating look of the peasants shows 
with what alacrity they enter into any subject 



in which they are interested. This striking 
difference in the national character of the two 
people appears in their different modes of con- 
ducting war. Firm in the maintenance of their 
purpose, and undaunted in the discharge of 
military duty, the Swiss are valuable chiefly 
for their stubborn qualities — for that obstinate 
courage on which a commander can rely with 
perfect certainty for the maintenance of any 
position which may be assigned for their de- 
fence. It was their stubborn resistance, ac 
cordinglv, which first laid the foundation of the 
independence of their republic, and which 
taught the Imperialists and the Burgundians 
at Laupen and Morat, that the pride of feudal 
power, and the ardour of chivalrous enter- 
prise, may seek in vain to crush " the might 
that slumbers in a peasant's arm." In later 
times the same disposition has been evinced 
in the conduct of the Swiss Guards, in the 
Place Carousel, all of whom were massacred 
at their post, without the thought of capitula- 
tion or retreat being once stirred amongst them. 
The Tyrolese, on the other hand, are more 
distinguished by their fiery and impetuous 
mode of fighting. In place of waiting, like the 
Swiss infantry, the charges of their enemies, 
they rush on unbidden to the attack, and often 
accomplish, by the hardihood of the enterprise, 
what more cautious troops could never suc- 
ceed in effecting. In this respect they resemble 
more nearly the Highland clans, who, in the 
rebellion in 1745, dashed with the broadsword 
on the English regiments ; or the peasants of 
La Vendee,who,without cannon or ammunition, 
assaulted the veteran bands of the republic, 
and by the fury of their onset, frequently de- 
stroyed armies with whom they would have 
been utterly unable to cope in a more regular 
system of warfare. 

One reflection there is, which may be drawn 
from the determined valour of the Tyrolese, 
and their success against the disciplined armies 
of France, which it is of the utmost importance 
to impress steadily on our minds. It is this ; 
that the changes in the art of war in modern 
times has produced no alteration on the ability 
of freedom to resist the aggressions of despotic 
powers; but that still, as in ancient times, the 
discipline and the numbers of arbitrary govern- 
ments are alike unavailing against the stub- 
born valour of a free people. In every age, 
and in every part of the world, examples are 
to be found of the defeat of great and power- 
ful armies by the cool and steady resistance 
which characterizes the inhabitants of free 
states. This is matter of proverbial remark ; 
but it is of the more importance to observe, 
that this general steadiness and valour, which 
seek for no support but in the courage of the 
individual, can be attained only by the diffusion 
of civil liberty, and that the value of such qua- 
lities is as strongly felt in modern wars as it 
was in any former period of the world. It is 
related by Homer, that at the siege of Troy, 
the Trojan troops, in whom the vicinity of 
Asia had introduced the customs of oriental 
warfare, and the feelings of oriental despotism, 
supported each other's courage by shouts and 
cries during the heat of the battles ; while the 
Grecians, in whom, as Mitford has observed, 



124 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



the monarchical form of government was even 
then tempered by a strong mixture of republi- 
can freedom,* stood firm, in perfect silence, 
waiting the command of their chiefs. The 
passage is remarkable, as it shows how early, 
in the history of mankind, the great lines of 
distinction between the courage of freemen and 
slaves was drawn; nor can we perhaps any- 
where find, in the subsequent annals of the 
world, a closer resemblance to what occurred 
in the struggle between English freedom niul 
FrencU despotism on the field of Waterloo. 
" The Grecian phalanx," says the poet, " march- 
ed in close order, the leaders directing each 
his own band. The rest were mute; inso- 
much, that you would say, in so great a multi- 
tude there urns no voice. Such was the silence 
with which they respectfully watched for the 
word of command from their officers. But the 
cries of the Trojan army resembled the bleat- 
ing of sheep when they are driven into the 
fold, and hear the cries of their lambs. Nor 
did the voice of one people rise from their 
lines, but a confused mixture of many tongues."f 
The same distinction has been observed in all 
periods of the world, between the native un- 
bending courage of freemen, and the artificial 
or transitory ardour of the troops of despotic 
states. It was thus that the three hundred 
Spartans stood the shock of a mighty army in 
the defile of Thermopylae ; and it was from the 
influence of the same feeling, that, with not less 
devoted valour, the fifteen hundred Swiss died 
in the cemetery of St. James, in the battle of 
Basle. The same individuil determination 
which enabled the citizens of Milan to over- 
throw the whole feudal power of Frederic 
Barbarossa on the plain of Legnano, animated 
the shepherds of the Alps, when they trampled 
under foot the pride of the imperial nobility 
on the field of Sempach, and annihilated the 
chivalry of Charles the Bold on the shores of 
Morat. It was among the free inhabitants of 
the Flemish provinces, that Count Tilly found 
the materials of those brave Walloon guards, 
who, as contemporary writers inform us, might 
be knocked down or trampled under foot, but 
could not be constrained to fly by the arms of 
Gustavus at the battle of Leipsic ;* and the 
celebrity of the Spanish infantry declined from 
the time that the liberties of Arragon and Cas- 
tile were extinguished by Charles V. " There 



* Mitford, i. 158. 

+ "flj t6t' iiraaavTcpai AavatTtv k'ivijvto ifuxXayyc; 
NwXtfifws irdXeiiuvrie. kcXcvc ti otaiv eKas-os 
'\\ycjx6ii<i>v ol 6' dXXoi dk'rtv itrav — oi<ii kc <J>nirii 
Toacrov Xadv tncatiai sxovr cv s~fl^^c '" atxjrj" — 
Siyfj SeiSi6rr( oppavTopas' dprbi Si rraoiv 
"Ycixca ttoikiX' s'Xapnc, ra ctpevot Ls-tx^^vro. 
Tpwe; <T, wjt' Si'es TrnXvirapovos dvlpos iv avXr\ 
Mupi'ai ts-i)Kaaiv dpeXy6ptvai yaXa Xevx6v, 
' A£r/\£y pepaKvTai, aKovovaai bna dpvoiv 
Sis Tpiotoi/ dXaXr)r6s dva s-rparov ivovv dni'ipci. 
Oil yap TTiivTOjvricv bpoi §p6os, ovS' 'ia yijptif, 
'AXXa yXwaa' iplfiiKro' TroXvKXtjToi 6' iaav avipef. 
Iliad iv. 427. 

t Memoirs of a Cavalier, by Defoe. 



is ample room," as a late eminent writer* has 
well observed, " for national exultation at the 
names of Cressy, Poitiers, and Azincour. So 
great was the disparity of numbers upon those 
i' famous days, that we cannot, with the French 
historian, attribute the discomfiture of their 
hosts merely to mistaken tactics and too im- 
petuous valour. They yielded rather to the 
intrepid steadiness in danger, which had al- 
ready become the characteristic of our English 
soldiers, and which, during four centuries, has 
ensured their superiority wherever ignorance 
or infatuation has not led them into the field. 
But these victories, and the qualities that se- 
cured them, must chiefly be ascribed to the 
freedom of our constitution and the superior 
condition of the people. Not the nobility of 
England, not the feudal tenants, won the battles 
of Cressy and Poitiers, for these were fully 
matched in the ranks of France, but the yeo- 
men who drew the bow with strong and steady 
arms, accustomed to its use in their native 
fields, and rendered fearless by personal com- 
petence and civil freedom.f 

Now, after all that we have heard of the art 
of war being formed into a regular system, of 
the soldier being reduced to a mere machine, 
and of the progress of armies being made the 
subject of arithmetical calculation; it is truly 
consoling to find the discomfiture of the great- 
est and most disciplined army which the world 
has ever seen, brought about by the same 
cause which, in former times, have so often 
given victory to the cause of freedom; to find 
the victories of Naefels and Morgarten renew- 
ed in the triumph of the Tyrolese patriots, and 
the ancient superiority of the English yeomanry 
asserted, as in the days of Cressy and Azin- 
cour, on the field of Waterloo. Nor is it per- 
haps the least remarkable fact of that memo- 
rable day, that while the French army, like the 
Trojans of old, animated their courage by in- 
cessant cries; the English battalions, like the 
Greek phalanxes, waited in silence the charge 
of their enemies: proving thus, in the severest 
of all trials, that the art of war has made no 
change on the qualities essential in the soldier; 
and that the determined courage of freemen is 
still able, as in the days of Marathon and 
Plataea, to overcome the utmost efforts of mili- 
tary power. It is interesting to find the same 
qualities distinguishing the armies of a free 
people in such distant periods of the world ; 
and it is the fit subject, not merely of national 
pride, but of universal thankfulness, to disco- 
ver, that there are qualities in the composition 
of a great army which it is beyond the power 
of despotism to command; and that the utmost 
efforts of the military art, aided by the strongest 
incitements to military distinction, cannot 
produce that steady and unbending valour 
which springs from the enjoyment of civil 

LIBERTY. 



* Hallam's Middle Ages, i. 74. 
t Froissart, i. c. 162. 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



125 



FRANCE IN 1833/ 



Observations made on the spot by one who 
has long regarded the political changes of 
France with interest, may possibly be of ser- 
vice, in conveying to the public on the other 
side of the Channel some idea of the present 
state and future prospects of a nation, avow- 
edly followed as the leader by the liberal party 
all over the world, in the great work of politi- 
cal regeneration. Such a sketch, drawn with 
no feeling of political or national animosity, 
but with every wish for the present and future 
happiness of the great people among whom it 
is composed, may possibly cool many visionary 
hopes, and extinguish some ardent anticipa- 
tions ; but it will at least demonstrate what is 
the result, in the circumstances where it has 
been most triumphant, of democratic ascend- 
ency; and prepare the inhabitants of Great 
Britain for the fate, and the government which 
awaits them, if they continue to follow the 
footsteps of the French liberals in the career 
which has been recently brought, on this side 
of the channel, to so triumphant a conclusion. 
Most of the educated inhabitants of Great 
Britain visited France, during the restoration; 
many of them at different times. Every one 
thought he had acquired some idea of the 
political state and prospects of the country, 
and was enabled to form some anticipations 
as to its future destiny. We are now enabled 
to say, that most of these views were partial 
or erroneous. They were so, not so much 
from defect in the observation of France, as 
ignorance of the political principles and pas- 
sions which were at work amongst its inha- 
bitants ; from want of experience of the result 
of democratic convulsions ; from judging of a 
country over which the wave of revolution 
had passed, with the ideas drawn from one 
which had expelled its fury. We observed 
France accurately enough; but we did so with 
English eyes; we supposed its inhabitants to 
be actuated by the feelings and interests, and 
motives, which were then at work among our- 
selves ; and could form no conception of the 
new set of principles and desires which are 
stirred up during the agitation of a revolution. 
In this respect our powers of observation are 
now materially improved. We have had some 
experience during the last three years of de- 
mocratic convulsion; we know the passion 
and desires which are developed by arraying 
the lower orders against the higher. We have 
acquired an acquaintance with the signs and 
marks of revolutionary terror. Standing thus 
on the confines of the two systems ; at the ex- 
tremity of English liberty, and the entrance of 
French democracy, we are now peculiarly 
qualified to form an accurate opinion of the 
tendency of these opposite principles of go- 



* Blackwood's Magazine, October and December, 
1833.- Written durins; a residence at Paris, and in the 
north of France, in the autumn of that year. 



vernment ; we know the landmarks of the 
civilization which is receding from the view, 
and have gained some acquaintance with the 
perils of that which is approaching ; and com- 
bining recent with former experience in our 
own and the neighbouring country, can form 
a tolerably accurate idea of the fate which 
awaits them and ourselves. 

The leading circumstance in the present 
condition of France, which first strikes an 
English observer, and is the most important 
feature it exhibits in a political point of view, 
is the enormous and apparently irresistible 
power of the central government at Paris over 
all the rest of France. This must appear 
rather a singular result after forty years of 
ardent aspirations after freedom, but neverthe- 
less nothing is more certain, and it constitutes 
the great and distinguishing result of the Re- 
volution. 

Such has been the centralization of power 
by the various democratic assemblies, who, at 
different times, have ruled the destinies of this 
great country, that there is hardly a vestige of 
power or influence now left to the provinces. 
All the situations of emolument of every de- 
scription, from the highest to the lowest, in 
every department and line of life, are in the 
gift of government. No man, in a situation 
approaching to that of a gentleman, can rise 
either in the civil or military career in any 
part of France, unless he is promoted by the 
central offices at Paris. These are general 
expressions, which convey no definite idea. A 
few examples will render the state of the 
country in this particular more intelligible. 

The Chamber of Peers, who now hold their 
situations only for life, are appointed by the 
Crown. 

The whole army, now four hundred thou- 
sand strong, is at the disposal of government. 
All the officers in that great body of course 
receive their appointment from the War-office 
at Paris. 

The navy, no inconsiderable force, is also 
appointed by the same power. 

The whole artificers and officers connected 
with the engineers and artillery, a most nu- 
merous body in a country so beset with fortifi- 
cations and fortresses as France, derive their 
appointments from the central government. 

The custom-house officers, an immense 
body, whose huts and stations are set down at 
short distances all round France, are all no- 
minated by the central office at Paris. 

The whole mayors of communes, with their 
" adjoints," amounting over all France to 
eighty-eight thousand persons, are appointed 
by the central government, or the prefects of 
departments whom they have nominated. 

The post-office, in every department through- 
out the kingdom, is exclusively filled by the 
servants of government. 
2l2 



126 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



The police, an immense force, having not 
less than eighty thousand employes in constant 
occupation, and which extends its iron net 
over the whole country, are all appointed by 
the minister at the head of that department. 

The clergy over the whole country receive 
their salaries from government, and are ap- 
pointed by the crown. 

The whole teachers of youth of every de- 
scription, in all public or established semina- 
ries, whether parochial or departmental, are 
appointed by the minister of public instruc- 
tion. 

The management of the roads, bridges, and 
chaussees, throughout all the kingdom, is in- 
trusted to persons appointed by the crown. No 
man can break a stone, or mend a bridge, or 
repair a pavement, from Calais to Bayonne, 
unless he is in the service of government ; and 
all the labourers on the roads have an uniform 
hat, with the words "Cantonnier," or " Pon- 
tonnier," upon it, indicating that they are in 
the service of the state. 

The post-horses over all France are under 
the control of the crown. Not only the post- 
masters, but every postillion from Brest to 
Marseilles, and Strasburg to Bourdeaux, are 
nominated by the government. No additional 
hand can be added in the remotest relay of 
horses without the authority of the Parisian 
bureaux. On all the great roads in the north 
of France there are too {ew postillions, and 
travellers are daily detained hours on the 
road, not because horses are awanting, but 
because it has not pleased the ministers of the 
interior to appoint a sufficient number of pos- 
tillions for the different stations. In the south, 
the case is the reverse ; the postillions are too 
numerous, and can hardly live, from the divi- 
sion of their business among so many hands ; 
but the mandate has gone forth from the 
Tuileries, and obedience must be the order of 
the day. 

The whole diligences, stage-coaches, mails, 
and conveyances of every description which 
convey travellers by relays of horses in every 
part of France, must employ the post-horses 
and postillions appointed at the different sta- 
tions by the crown. No private individual or 
company can run a coach with relays with 
their own horses. They may establish as 
many coaches as they choose, but they must 
all be drawn by the royal horses and postillions, 
if they do not convey the travellers en voitwier 
with the same horses all the way. This great 
monopoly was established by an arret of the 
Directory, 9th December, 1798, which is in 
these terms ; " Nul autre que les maitres de 
poste, munis d'une commission speciale, ne 
pourra etablir de relais particuliers, relayer ou 
conduire a titre de louage des voyageurs d'un 
relais a un autre, a peine d'etre contraint de 
payer par forme d'indemnite le prix de la 
course, au profit des maitres de poste et des 
postilions qui auront 6te frustres." 

The whole firemen throughout France are 
organized in battalions, and wear a uniform 
like soldiers, and are appointed by govern- 
ment. 

The whole judges, superior and inferior, 
over the whole kingdom, as well as the prefets, 



sous-prefets, procureurs du roi, and in gene- 
ral all the legal offices of every description, are 
appointed by government. The only excep- 
tion are the judges du paix, a sort of arbiters 
and mediators in each canton, to settle the 
trifling disputes of the peasants, whom they 
are permitted to name for themselves. 

The whole officers employed in the collec- 
tion of the revenue, over the whole country, 
are appointed by the government. They are 
an extremely numerous body, and add im- 
mensely to the influence of the central author- 
ity, from whom all their appointments emanate. 
It would be tedious to carry this enumera- 
tion farther. Suffice it to say, that the govern- 
ment of France has now drawn to itself the 
whole patronage in every department of busi- 
ness and line of life over the whole countrv. 
The army, the navy, the law, the church, the 
professors and teachers of every description ; 
the revenue, the post-office, the roads, bridges 
and canals, the post-horses, the postillions, the 
firemen, the police, the gen-d'armes, the pre- 
fects, the mayors, the magistrates, constitute so 
many different branches in which the whole 
patronage is vested in the central government 
at Paris, and in which no step can be taken, 
or thing attempted, without the authority of 
the minister for that department, or the deputy 
in the capital. In consequence of this prodi- 
gious concentration of power and patronage in 
the public offices of Paris, and the total stripping 
of every sort of influence from the depart- 
ment, the habit has become universal in every 
part of France, of looking to Paris, not only 
for the initiation in every measure and thought, 
but for the means of getting on in every line 
of life. Has a man a son to put into the "army 
or navy, the law, the church, the police, or re- 
venue? He finds that he has no chance of 
success unless he is taken by the hand by the 
government. Is he anxious to make him a 
professor, a teacher, or a schoolmaster? He 
is obliged to look to the same quarter for the 
means of advancement. Is his ambition li- 
mited to the humbler situation of a postmaster, 
a bridge contractor, a courier, or a postillion ? 
He must pay his court to the prefect of the de- 
partment, in order to obtain a recommendation 
to the minister of the interior, or the director 
of bridges and roads. Is he even reduced to 
earn his bread by breaking stones upon the 
highways, or paving the streets of the towns ? 
He must receive the wages of government, 
and must wear their livery for his tv/enty sous 
a day. Thus in every department and line of 
life, government patronage is indispensable, 
and the only way in which success is to be 
obtained is by paying court to some person in 
authority. 

In a commercial and manufacturing country 
such as England, many and various means 
exist of rising to wealth and distinction, inde- 
pendent of government; and in some the oppo- 
sition line is the surer passport to eminence 
of the two. Under the old constitution of 
England, when political power was vested in 
the holders of great property, and the great 
body of the people watched their proceedings 
with distrust and jealousy, eminence was to 
be attained in any public profession, as the 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



127 



bar or the senate, chiefly by acquiring the suf- 
frages of the greater number of the citizens ; 
and hence the popular independent line was 
the one which in general led soonest to fame 
and eminence. Commerce and manufactures 
opened up a thousand channels of lucrative 
industry, independent altogether of government 
support ; and many of the most important 
branches of patronage, great part of the church, 
and the majority of all establishments for 
education, were in the hands of corporations 
or private individuals, often in opposition to, 
or unconnected with, ministerial influence. 
But the reverse of all this obtains in France. 
There little commerce or manufactures are, 
comparatively speaking, to be found. With 
the exception of Paris, Lyons, Bourdeaux, 
Rouen, and Marseilles, no considerable com- 
mercial cities exist, and the innumerable chan- 
nels for private adventure which the colonial 
possessions and immense trade of Britain open 
up are unknown. All the private establish- 
ments or corporations vested with patronage 
in any line, as the church, education, charity, 
or the like, were destroyed during the Revolu- 
tion of 1793, and nothing left but the great and 
overwhelming power of government, standing 
the more prominently forward, from the extinc- 
tion of every rival authority which might 
compete with its influence. 

From the same cause has arisen a degree 
of slavish submission, in all the provinces of 
France, to the will or caprice of the metropo- 
lis, which is almost incredible, and says but 
little for the independence of thought and cha- 
racter which has grown up in that country 
since the schoolmaster has been abroad. From 
the habit of looking to Paris for directions in 
every thing, from the making of a king to the 
repairing of a bridge, from overturning a dy- 
nasty to breaking a stone, they have absolutely 
lost the power of judging for themselves, or 
taking the initiative in any thing either of the 
greatest or the smallest moment. This ap- 
pears, in the most striking manner, in all the 
political changes which have taken place in 
the country for the last forty years. Ever since 
the bones of old France were broken by the 
Constituent Assembly : since the parliaments, 
the provinces, the church, the incorporations, 
were swept away by their gigantic acts of de- 
mocratic despotism, the departments have 
sunk into absolute insignificance, and every 
thing has been determined by the will of the 
capital, and the acts of the central government 
at its head. When the Girondists, the illus- 
trious representatives of the country districts, 
were proscribed, the most violent feelings of 
indignation spread through the south and west 
of France. Sixty-five, out of the eighty-four 
departments, rose in insurrection against the 
despotism of the capital ; but the unwonted 
exertion surpassed their strength, and they 
soon yielded, without a struggle worth the no- 
tice of history, to its usurped authority. When 
Robespierre executed Danton and his adher- 
ents ; when he himself sunk under the stroke 
of the Thermidorians ; when Napoleon over- 
threw the national guard of Paris, in October, 
1795 ; when the Directory were expelled by the 
bayonets of Augereau, on the 18th Fructidor, 



1797; when Napoleon seized the reins of 
power in November, 1799; when he declared 
himself emperor, and overturned all the prin- 
ciples of the Revolution in 1804; when he was 
vanquished by the allies in 1814; when he re- 
sumed the helm in 1815; when he was finally 
dethroned after the battle of Waterloo ; when 
the revolt of the barricades established a re- 
volutionary government in the capital; Avhen 
the suppression of the insurrection at the 
cloister of St. Merri defeated a similar attempt 
two years afterwards, the obedient departments 
were equally ready with their addresses of 
congratulation, and on every one of these va- 
rious, contradictory, and inconsistent changes, 
France submitted at once to the dictatorial 
power of Paris ; and thirty millions of men 
willingly took the law from the caprices or 
passions of a few hundred thousands. The 
subjection of Rome to the Praetorian guards, 
or of Turkey to the Janizaries, was never more 
complete. 

It was not thus in old France. The greatest 
and most glorious efforts of her people, in fa- 
vour of freedom, were made when the capital 
was in the hands of foreign or domestic ene- 
mies. The English more than once wrested 
Paris from their grasp ; but the forces of the 
south rallied behind the Loire, and at length 
expelled the cruel invaders from their shores. 
The forces of the League were long in posses- 
sion of the capital ; but Henry IV., at the head 
of the militia of the provinces, at length con- 
quered its citizens, and Paris received a master 
from the roots of the Pyrenees. The Revolu- 
tion of 1789 commenced with the provinces: 
it was their parliaments, which, under Louis 
XV. and XVI., spread the spirit of resistance 
to arbitrary power through the country; and 
it was from their exertions, that the unanimous 
spirit, which compelled the court to convoke 
the states-general, arose. Now all is changed; 
not a murmur, not a complaint against the 
acts of the capital, is to be heard from Calais 
to Bayonne ; but the obedient departments are 
equally ready at the arrival of the mail, or the 
receipt of the telegraph, to hail with shouts a 
republic or an empire ; a dictator or a consul ; 
a Robespierre or a Napoleon ; a monarch, the 
heir of fourteen centuries; or a hero, the child 
of an hundred victories. 

All the great and useful undertakings, which 
in England, and all free countries, emanate 
from the capital or skill of individuals, or as- 
sociated bodies, in France spring from the go- 
vernment, and the government alone. Their 
universities, schools, and colleges; academies 
of primary and secondary instruction ; mili- 
tary and polytechnic schools ; hospitals, cha- 
ritable institutions, libraries, museums, and 
public establishments of all sorts; their har- 
bours, bridges, roads, canals — every thing, in 
short, originates with, and is directed by, the 
government. Hence, individuals in France 
seldom attempt any thing for the public good: 
private advantage, or amusement, the rise of 
fortune, or the increase of power, constitute 
the general motives of action. Like the pas- 
sengers in a ship, or the soldiers in an army, 
the French surrender themselves, without a 
struggle, to the guidance of those in possession 



128 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



of the helm ; or if they rise in rebellion against 
them, it is not so much from any view to the 
public good, as from a desire to secure to them- 
selves the advantages which the possession 
of political power confers. 

This extraordinary concentration of every 
ihing in the central government at Paris, 
always existed to a certain extent in France ; 
but it has been increased, to a most extraordi- 
nary degree, under the democratic rule of the 
last forty years. It was the Constituent As- 
sembly, borne forward on the gales of revo- 
lutionary fervour, which made the greatest 
additions to the power of government — not 
merely by the concentration of patronage and 
direction of every kind in ministers, but by 
the destruction of the aristocracy, the church, 
the incorporations; — every thing, in short, 
which could withstand or counterbalance the 
influence of government. The people, charmed 
with the installation of their representatives in 
supreme power, readily acquiesced in, or rather 
strenuously supported, all the additions made 
by the democratic legislature to the powers 
of the executive; fondly imagining that, by so 
doing, they were laying the surest foundation 
for the continuance of their own power. They 
little foresaw, what the event soon demon- 
strated, that they were incapable, in the long 
run, of preserving this power; that it would 
speedily fall into the hands of ambitious or 
designing men, who flattered their passions, 
in order to secure the possession of arbitrary 
authority for themselves ; and that, in the end, 
the absolute despotism, which they had created 
for the purpose of perpetuating the rule of the 
multitude, would terminate in imposing on 
them the most abject servitude. When Napo- 
leon came to the throne, he found it unneces- 
sary to make any great changes in the practical 
working of government; he found a despotism 
ready made to his hand, and had only to seize 
the reins, so tightly bitted on the nation by his 
revolutionary predecessors. 

The Revolution of July made no difference 
in this respect; or rather it tended to concen- 
trate still farther in the metropolis the authority 
and power of government. The able and in- 
defatigable leaders, who during the fifteen years 
of the Restoration had laboured incessantly to 
subvert the authority of the royalists, had no 
sooner succeeded, than they quietly took pos- 
session of all the powers which they enjoyed, 
and, supported with more talent, and a greater 
display of armed force, exercised them with 
far greater severity. No concessions to real 
freedom were made — no division of the powers 
of the executive took place. All appointments 
in every line still flow from Paris : not a pos- 
tillion can ride a post-horse, nor peasant break 
a stone on the highways, from the Channel to 
the Pyrenees, unless authorized by the cen- 
tral authority. The legislature convoked by 
Louis Philippe has done much to abridge the 
authority of others, but nothing to diminish 
that which is most to be dreaded. They have 
destroyed the hereditary legislature, the last 
remnant of European civilization which the 
convulsions of their predecessors had left, but 
done nothing to weaken the authority of the 
executive. Louis Philippe enjoys, during the 



precarious tenure of his crown, at the will of 
the Praetorian Guards of Paris, more absolute 
authority than ever was held by the most des- 
potic of the Bourbon race. 

France being held in absolute subjection by 
Paris, all that is necessary to preserve this 
authority is to secure the mastery of the 
capital. Marshal Soult has taught the citizen 
king how this is to be done. He keeps an 
immense military force, from 35,000 to 40,000 
men, constantly in the capital ; and an equal 
force is stationed within twelve miles round, 
ready to march at a signal from the telegraph on 
Montmartre, in a few hours, to crush any at- 
tempt at insurrection. In addition to this, there 
are 50,000 National Guards in Paris, and 
25,000 more in the Banlieue, or rural district 
round its walls, admirably equipped, well 
drilled, and, to appearance at least, quite equal 
to the regular soldiers. Of this great force, 
above 5000, half regulars and half National 
Guards, are every night on duty as sentinels, 
or patrols, in the capital. There is not a 
street where several sentinels, on foot or 
horseback, are not stationed, and within call 
of each a picquet or patrol, ready to render 
aid, if required, at a minute's notice. Paris, in 
a period of profound peace, without an enemy 
approaching the Rhine, resembles rather a city 
in hourly expectation of an assault from a 
beleaguering enemy, than the capital of a 
peaceful monarchy. 

In addition to this prodigious display of 
military force, the civil employes, the police, 
constitute a body nearly as formidable, and, 
to individuals at least, much more dangerous. 
Not only are the streets constantly traversed 
by this force in their appropriate dress, but 
more than half their number are always prowl- 
ing about, disguised as workmen or trades- 
men, to pick up information, mark individuals, 
and arrest discontented characters. They enter 
coffee-houses, mingle in groups, overhear con- 
versations, join in discussions, and if they 
discover any thing seditious or dangerous, they 
either arrest the delinquent at once, and hand 
him over to the nearest guard, or denounce 
him to their superiors, and he is arrested at 
night by an armed force in his bed. Once 
incarcerated, his career, for a long time at 
least, is terminated : he is allowed to lie there 
till his projects evaporate, or his associates 
are dispersed, without either being discharged 
or brought to trial. There is not a night at this 
time, (August, 1833,) that from fifteen to twenty 
persons are not arrested in this way by the 
police ; and nothing is heard of their subse- 
quent trial. 

From the long continuance of these arrests 
by the police, the prisons of Paris, spacious as 
they are, and ample as they were found during 
the Reign of Terror, have become unable to 
contain their numerous inmates. Fresh and 
extraordinary places of confinement have be- 
come necessary. A new jail, of great dimen- 
sions, guarded by an ample military force, has 
been constructed by the citizen king, near the 
cemetery of Pere la Chaise, where the over- 
flowings of the other prisons in Paris are safely 
lodged. The more dangerous characters are 
conveyed to fortresses in the interior, or the 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



129 



Chateau of Mount St. Michael in Normandy. 
This great state-prison, capable of holding 
many hundred prisoners, is situated in the 
sea, on the coast of the Channel, and amply 
tenanted now by the most unruly part of the 
population of Paris, under a powerful military 
and naval garrison. 

Above fifteen hundred persons were arrested 
after the great revolt at the Cloister of St. 
Merri, in June, 1832, and, though a few have 
been brought to trial or discharged, the great 
majority still remain in prison, in the charge 
of the police, under warrants apparently of 
interminable duration. The nightly arrests 
and numerous domiciliary visits are con- 
stantly adding to this immense number, and 
gradually thinning that ardent body who ef- 
fected the Revolution of July, and have proved 
so formidable to every government of France, 
since the beginning of the revolutionary trou- 
bles in 1789. The fragment of this body, who 
fought at the Cloister of St. Merri, evinced such 
heroic courage and invincible determination, 
that the government have resolved on a bellum ad 
intcrneciuiiem with such formidable antagonists, 
and, by the continued application of arrests 
and domiciliary visits, have now considerably 
weakened their numbers, as well as damped 
their hopes. Still it is against this democratic 
rump that all the vigilance of the police is 
exerted. The royalists are neglected or de- 
spised ; but the republicans, whom it is not so 
easy to daunt, are sought out with undecaying 
vigilance, and treated with uncommon severity. 

Public meetings, or any of the other constitu- 
tional modes of giving vent to general opinion 
in Great Britain, are unknown in France. If 
twenty or thirty thousand men were collected 
together in that way. they would infallibly be 
assailed by the military force, and their dis- 
persion, or the overthrow of the government, 
would be the consequence. 

The only relic of freedom, which has sur- 
vived the Revolution of July, is the liberty of 
the press. It is impossible to read the journals 
which are in every coffee-house every morn- 
ing, without seeing that all the efforts of des- 
potism have failed in coercing this mighty in- 
strument. The measures of public men are 
canvassed with unsparing severity: and not 
only liberal, but revolutionary measures ad- 
vocated with great earnestness, and no small 
share of ability. It is not, however, without 
the utmost efforts on the part of government 
to suppress it, that this licentiousness exists. 
Prosecutions against the press have been in- 
stituted with a degree of rigour and frequency, 
since the Revolution of July, unknown under 
the lenient and feeble government of the Re- 
storation. The Tribune, which is the leading 
republican journal, has reached its eighty-second 
prosecution, since the Three Glorious Days. 
More prosecutions have been instituted since 
the accession of the Citizen King, than during 
the whole fifteen that the elder branch of the 
Bourbons was on the throne. The govern- 
ment, however, have not ventured on the de- 
cisive step of suppressing the seditious jour- 
nals, or establishing a censorship of the press. 
The recollection of the Three Days, which 
commenced with the attempts to shut up the 
17 



printing-offices of some newspapers, prevents 
this last act of despotism. The National 
Guard, in all probability, would resist such an 
attempt, and if not supported by them, it would 
endanger the crown of Louis Philippe. Go- 
vernment has apparently discovered that the 
retention of the power of abuse consoles the 
Parisians for the loss of all their other liber- 
ties. They read the newspapers and see the 
ministry violently assailed, and imagine they 
are in full possession of freedom, though they 
cannot travel ten leagues from Paris without 
a passport, nor go to bed in the evening with 
any security that they will not be arrested 
during the night by the police, and consigned 
to prison, without any possibility of redress, 
for an indefinite period. 

The present government appears to be 
generally disliked, and borne from despair of 
getting any other, more than any real attach- 
ment. You may travel over the whole coun- 
try without discovering one trace of affection 
to the reigning family. Their names are 
hardly ever mentioned ; by common consent 
they appear to be consigned to oblivion by all 
classes. A large and ardent part of the peo- 
ple are attached to the memory of Napoleon, 
and seize every opportunity of testifying their 
admiration of that illustrious man. Another 
large and formidable body have openly es- 
poused the principles of democracy, and are 
indefatigable in their endeavours to establish 
their favourite dream of a republic. The 
Royalists, few in number in Paris and the 
great commercial towns, abound in the south 
and west, and openly proclaim their determi- 
nation, if Paris will take the lead, to restore 
the lawful race of sovereigns. But Louis 
Philippe has few disinterested partisans, but 
the numerous civil and military employes who 
wear his livery or eat his bread. Not a ves- 
tige of attachment to the Orleans dynasty is to 
be seen in France. Louis Philippe is a man 
of great ability, vast energy, and indomitable 
resolution : but though these are the qualities 
most dear to the French, he has no hold of 
their affections. His presence in Paris is 
known only by the appearance of a mounted 
patrol on each side of the arch in the Place 
Carousel, who are stationed there only when 
the king is at the Tuileries. He enters the 
capital, and leaves it, without any one inquir- 
ing or knowing any thing about him. If he 
is seen in the street, not a head is uncovered, 
not a cry of Vive le Roi is heard. Nowhere is 
a print or bust of any of the royal family to be 
seen. Not a scrap of printing narrating any 
of their proceedings, beyond the government 
journals, is to be met with. You may travel 
across the kingdom, or, what is of more con- 
sequence, traverse Paris in every direction, 
without being made aware, by any thing you 
see or hear, that a king exists in France. The 
royalists detest him, because he has establish- 
ed a revolutionary throne — the republicans, 
because he has belied all his professions in 
favour of freedom, and reared a military de» 
potism on the foundation of the Barricades. 

The French, in consequence of these ch 
cumstances, are in a very peculiar state. They 
are discontented with every thing, and what is 



130 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



worse, they know not to what quarter to look 
for relief. They are tired of the Citizen King, 
whom they accuse of saving money, and pre- 
paring for America; of having given them the 
weight of a despotism without its security, and 
the exhaustion of military preparation without 
either its glory or its advantages. They (ex- 
cluding the royalists) abhor the Bourbons, 
whom they regard as priest-ridden, and super- 
stitious, weak and feeble, men unfit to govern 
the first nation in the world. They dread a 
republic as likely to strip them of their sons 
and their fortunes; to induce an interminable 
war with the European powers ; deprive them 
of their incomes, and possibly endanger the 
national independence. They are discontented 
with the present, fearful of the future, and find 
their only consolation in reverting to the days 
of Napoleon and the Grand Army, as a bril- 
liant drama now lost for ever. They are in 
the situation of the victim of passion, or the 
slave of pleasure, worn out with enjoyment, 
blast with satiety, who has no longer any en- 
joyment in life, but incessantly revolts with 
the prurient restlessness of premature age to 
the orgies and the excesses of his youth. 

What then, it may be asked, upholds the > 
reigning dynasty, if it is hated equally by both 
the great parties who divide France, and can 
number none but its own official dependents 
among its supporters'? The answer is to be 
found in the immense extent of the pecuniary 
losses which the Revolution of July occasioned 
to all men of any property in the country, and 
the recollection of the Reign of Terror, which 
is still vividly present to the minds of the ex- 



isting generation. 

On the English side of the channel, few are 
aware of the enormous pecuniary losses with 
which the triumph of democracy, in July, 
1830, was attended. In Paris, all parties are 
agreed that the depreciation of property of 
every description in consequence of that event 
was about a third: in other words, every man 
found himself a third poorer after the" over- 
throw of Charles X. than he was before it. 
Over the remainder of France the losses sus- 
tained were nearly as great, in some places 
still heavier. For the two years which suc- 
ceeded the Barricades, trade and commerce 
of every description was at a stand; the import 
of goods declined a fourth, and one half of the 
shopkeepers in Paris and all the great towns 
became bankrupt. The distress among the 
labouring classes, and especially those who 
depended on the sale of articles of manufac- 
tured industry or luxury, was unprecedented. 
It is the recollection of this long period of na- 
tional agony which upholds the throne of Louis 
Philippe. The National Guard of Paris, who 
are in truth the ruling power in France, know 
by bitter experience to what a revolution, even 
of the most bloodless kind, leads— decay of 
business, decline of credit, stoppage of sales 
pressure of creditors. They recollect the in- 
numerable bankruptcies of 1830 and 1831, and 
are resolved that their names shall not enter 
the list They know that the next convulsion 
would establish a republic in unbridled sove- 
reignty: they know the principles of these 
apostles of democracy; they recollect their 



actions ; the Reign of Terror, the massacres 
in the prisons float before their eyes. They 
have a vivid impression also of the external 
'consequences of such an event: they know 
that their hot-headed youth would instantly 
press forward to regain the frontier of the 
Rhine ; they foresee an European war, a ces- 
sation of the influx of foreign wealth into 
Paris, and possibly a third visit by the Cos- 
sacks to the Champs Elysees. These are the 
considerations which maintain the allegiance 
of the National Guard, and uphold the throne 
of Louis Philippe, when there is hardly a 
spark of real attachment to him in the whole 
kingdom. He is supported, not because his 
character is loved, his achievements admired, 
or his principles venerated, but because he is 
the last barrier between France and revolu- 
tionary suffering, and because the people have 
drunk too deep of that draught to tolerate a re- 
petition of its bitterness. 

Although, therefore, there is a large and en- 
ergetic and most formidable party in France, 
who are ardently devoted to revolutionary 
principles, and long for a republic, as the 
commencement of every imaginable felicity; 
yet the body in whom power is at present 
really vested, is essentially conservative. The 
National Guard of Paris, composed of the 
most reputable of the citizens of that great me- 
tropolis, equipped at their own expense, and 
receiving no pay from government, consists 
of the very persons who have suffered most 
severely by the late convulsions. They form 
the ruling power in France; for to them more 
than the garrison of the capital, the govern- 
ment look for that support which is so neces- 
sary amidst the furious factions by whom 
they are assailed; and to their opinions the 
people attach a degree of weight which does 
not belong to any other body in France. The 
Chamber of Peers are disregarded, the legis- 
lative body despised; but the National Guard 
is the object of universal respect, because every 
one feels that they possess the power of 
making or unmaking kings. The crown does 
not hesitate to act in opposition to a vote of 
both Chambers ; but the disapprobation of a 
majority of the National Guard is sure to com- 
mand attention. In vain the Chamber of De- 
puties refused a vote of supplies for the erec- 
tion of detached forts round Paris ; the ground 
was nevertheless purchased, and the sappers 
and miners, armed to the teeth, were busily 
employed from four in the morning till twelve 
at night, in their construction ; but when seve- 
ral battalions of the National Guard, in de- 
filing before the king, on the anniversary of 
the Three Days, exclaimed, " A bas les forts 
detaches," the works were suspended, and are 
now going on only at Vincennes, and two 
other points. That which was refused to the 
collected wisdom of the Representatives of 
France is conceded at once to the cries of 
armed men : the ultimate decision is made by 
the bayonet; and the boasted improvements 
of modern civilization, terminate in the same 
appeal to physical strength which character- 
ize the days of Clovis. 

This contempt into which the legislature 
has fallen, is one of the great features of 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



131 



France, since the Revolution of July; but it is 
one 'which is least known or understood on 
the English side of the channel. The causes 
which produced it had been long in operation, 
but it was that event which brought them fully 
and prominently into view. The supreme 
power has now passed into other hands. It 
was neither the Peers nor the Commons, but 
the Populace in the streets, the heroes of the 
Barricades, who seated Louis Philippe on the 
throne. The same force, it is acknowledged, 
possesses the power to dethrone him ; and 
hence the National Guard of the capital, as 
the organized concentration of this power, is 
looked to with respect. The departments, it 
is known, will hail with shouts whatever king, 
or whatever form of government the armed 
force in the capital choose to impose ; the de- 
puties, it is felt, will hasten to make their sub- 
mission to the leaders who have got possession 
of the treasury, the bank, the telegraph, and 
the war office. Hence, the strife of faction 
is no longer carried on by debates in the 
Chambers, or efforts in the legislature. The 
National Guard of Paris is the body to which 
all attention is directed ; and if the departments 
are considered, it is not in order to influence 
their representatives, but to procure addresses 
or petitions from members of their National 
Guards, to forward the views of the great par- 
ties at work in the metropolis. Such petitions 
or addresses are daily to be seen in the public 
papers, and are referred to with undisguised 
satisfaction by the parties whose views they 
support. No regard is paid but to the men who 
have bayonets in their hands. Every thing 
directly, or indirectly, is referred to physical 
strength, and the dreams of modern equality 
are fast degenerating into the lasting empire 
of the sword. 

The complete insignificance of the Cham- 
bers, however, is to be referred to other and 
more general causes than the successful re- 
volt of the Barricades. That event only tore 
aside the veil which concealed the weakness 
of the legislature; and openly proclaimed 
what political wisdom had long feared, that 
the elements of an authoritative and pa- 
ramount legislature do not exist in France. 
When the National Assembly destroyed the 
nobility, the landed proprietors, the clergy, and 
the incorporations of the country, they rendered 
a respectable legislature impossible. It is in 
vain to attentpt to give authority or weight to 
ordinary individuals not gifted with peculiar 
talents, by merely electing them as members 
of parliament. If they do not, from their 
birth, descent, fortune, or estates, alreadv pos- 
sess it, their mere translation in the legislature 
will never have this effect. The House of 
Commons under the old English constitution 
was so powerful, because it contained the re- 
presentatives of all the great and lasting inte- 
rests of the country, of its nobles, its landed 
proprietors, its merchants, manufacturers, 
burghers, tradesmen, and peasants. It com- 
manded universal respect, because every man 
felt that his own interests were wound up with 
and defended by a portion of that body. But 
this is not and cannot be the case in France — 
the classes are destroyed from whom the re- 



presentatives of such varied interests must be 
chosen : the interests in the nation do not exist 
whose intermixture is essential to a weighty 
legislature. Elected by persons possessed of 
one uniform qualification — the payment of di- 
rect taxes to the amount of two hundred francs, 
or eight pounds sterling a-year — the deputies 
are the representatives only of one class in 
society, the small proprietors. The other in- 
terests in the state either do not exist or are 
not represented. The persons who are chosen 
are seldom remarkable either for their fortune, 
family, talent, or character. They are, to use 
a homely expression, "neighbour like;" indi- 
viduals of a bustling character, or ambitious 
views, who have taken to politics as the best 
and most lucrative profession they could 
choose, as opening the door most easily to the 
innumerable civil and military offices which 
are the object of universal ambition in France. 
Hence they are not looked up to with respect 
even by their own department, who can never 
get over the homeliness of their origin or 
moderation of their fortune, and by the rest of 
France are unknown or despised. 

The chief complaint against the legislature 
in France is, that it is swayed by corruption 
and interested motives. That complaint has 
greatly increased since the lowering of the free- 
hold qualification from three hundred to two 
hundred francs of direct taxes, in consequence 
of the Revolution of July. This change has 
opened the door to a lower and more corruptible 
class of men ; numbers of whom got into the 
legislature by making the most vehement pro- 
fessions of liberal opinions to theirconstituents, 
which they instantly forgot when the seductions 
of office and emolument were displayed before 
their eyes. The majority of the Chamber, it 
is alleged, are gained by corruption ; and the 
more that the qualification is lowered the worse 
has this evil become. This is founded on the 
principles of human nature, and is of univer- 
sal application. The more that you descend 
in society, the more will you find men accessi- 
ble to base and selfish considerations, because 
bribes are of greater value to those who pos- 
sess little or nothing than those who possess 
a great deal. Many of the higher ranks are 
corrupt, but the power of resisting seduction 
exists to a greater degree among them than 
their inferiors. You often run the risk of In- 
sult if you offer a man or woman of elevated 
station a bribe, but seldom if it is insinuated 
into the hand of their valet or lady's maid; 
and when the ermine of the bench is unspotted, 
so much can frequently not be said of the clerks 
or servants of those elevated functionaries. 
Where the legislature is elected by persons 
of that inferior description, the influence of 
corruption will always be found to increase. It 
is for the people of England to judge whether 
the Reformed Parliament is or is not destined 
to afford another illustration of the rule. 

To whatever cause it may be owing, the fact 
is certain, and cannot be denied by any person 
practically acquainted with France, that the 
Chamber of Deputies has fallen into the most 
complete contempt. Their debates have al- 
most disappeared ; they are hardly reported 
by the public press ; seldom is any opposition 



132 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



to be seen amongst them. When Louis Phi- 
lippe's crown was in jeopardy in June, 1832, it 
was to the National Guard, and not to either 
branch of the legislature, that all parties look- 
ed with anxiety. A unanimous vote of the old 
English Parliament would probably have had 
great weight with an English body of insur- 
gents, as it certainly disarmed the formidable 
mutineers at the Nore ; but a unanimous vote 
of both Chambers at Paris would have had little 
or no effect. A hearty cheer from three bat- 
talions of National Guards would have been 
worth a hundred votes of the Chambers; and 
an insurrection, which all the moral force of 
■Parliament could not subdue, fell before the 
vigour of two regiments of National Guards 
from the Banlieue. 

It is owing apparently to this prodigious as- 
cendency of the National Guard of Paris, that 
the freedom of discussion in the public jour- 
nals has survived all the other liberties of 
France. These journals are, in truth, the 
pleaders before the supreme tribunals which 
govern the country, and they are flattered by 
the fearlessness of the language which is em- 
ployed before them. They are as tenacious 
of the liberty of the press at Paris, in conse- 
quence, as the Praetorian Guards or Janizaries 
were of their peculiar and ruinous privileges. 
The cries of the National Guard, the ruling 
power in France, are prejudiced by the inces- 
sant efforts of the journals on the different 
sides, who have been labouring for months or 
years to sway their opinions. Thus the ulti- 
mate appeal in that country is to the editors 
of newspapers, and the holders of bayonets, 
perhaps the classes of all others who are most 
unfit to be intrusted with the guidance of pub- 
lic affairs ; and certainly those the least quali- 
fied, in the end, to maintain their independence 
against the seductions or offers of a powerful 
executive. 

The central governmental Paris is omnipo- 
tent in France; but it does by no means follow 
from that, that this central government is itself 
placed on a stable foundation. The authority 
of the seraglio is paramount over Turkey : 
but within its precincts the most dreadful 
contests are of perpetual recurrence. The 
National Assembly, by concentrating all the 
powers of government in the capital, necessa- 
rily delivered over its inhabitants to an inter- 
minable future of discord and strife. When 
once it is discovered that the mainspring of 
all authority and influence is to be found in 
the government offices of Paris, the efforts of 
the different parties who divide the state are 
incessant to make themselves masters of the 
talisman. This is to be done, not by any 
efforts in the departments, any speeches in the 
legislature, or any measures for the public 
good, but by incessant working at the armed 
force of the capital. By labouring in the pub- 
lic journals, in pamphlets, books, reviews, and 
magazines, for a certain number of years, the 
faction in opposition at length succeed in 
making an impression on the holders of bay- 
onets in Paris, or on the ardent and penniless 
youth who frequent its coffee-houses; and 
when once this is done, by a well organized 



are roused; the National Guard hesitate, or 
join the insurgents ; the troops of the line re- 
fuse to act against their fellow-citizens; the 
reigning dynasty is dethroned; a new flag is 
hoisted at the Tuileries ; and the submissive 
departments hasten to declare their allegiance 
to the reigning power now in possession of the 
treasury and the telegraph, and disposing of 
some hundred thousand civil and military 
offices throughout France. 

No sooner is this great consummation 
effected, than the fruits of the victory begin to 
be enjoyed by the successful party. Offices, 
honours, posts, and pensions, are showered 
down on the leaders, the officers, and pioneers 
in the great work of national regeneration. 
The editors of the journals whose side has 
proved victorious, instantly become ministers: 
all their relations and connections, far beyond 
any known or computable degree of consan- 
guinity, are seated in lucrative or important 
offices. Regiments of cavalry, prefetships, 
sous-prefetships, procureurships, mayorships, 
adjointships, offices in the customs, excise, 
police, roads, bridges, church, universities, 
schools, or colleges, descend upon them thick 
as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa. Mean- 
while the vanished party are universally and 
rigidly excluded from office, their whole rela- 
tions and connections in every part of France 
find themselves suddenly reduced to a state of 
destitution, and their only resource is to begin 
to work upon the opinions of the armed force 
or restless population of the capital, in the 
hope that, after the lapse of a certain number 
of years, another revolution may be effected, 
and the golden showers descend upon them- 
selves. 

In the Revolution of July, prepared as it 
had been by the efforts of the liberal press for 
fifteen years in France, and organized as it 
was by the wealth of Lafitte, and a few of the 
great bankers in Paris, this system was suc- 
cessful. And accordingly, Thiers, Guizot, the 
Duke de Broglio, and the whole coterie of the 
doctrinaires, have risen at once, from being 
editors of newspapers, or lecturers to students, 
to the station of ministers of state, and dis- 
pensers of several hundred thousand offices. 
They are now, in consequence, the objects of 
universal obloquy and hatred with the remain- 
der of the liberal party, who accuse them of 
having sacrificed all their former opinions, 
and embraced all the arbitrary tenets of the 
royalist faction, whom they were instrumental 
in subverting. Their conduct since they came 
into office, and especially since the accession 
of Casimir Perier's administration on the 13th 
March, 1831, has been firm and moderate, 
strongly inclined to conservative principles, 
and, in consequence, odious to the last degree 
to the anarchical faction by whose aid they 
rose to greatness. 

The great effort of this excluded faction was 
made on the 5th and 6th of June, 1832, on 
occasion of the funeral of Lamarque. In 
England it was not generally known how for- 
midable that insurrection was, and how 
nearly it had subverted the newly erected 
throne of the Barricades. Above eighty thou- 



.emeute, the whole is concluded. The people | sand persons, including a considerable por- 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



133 



tion of the National Guard from the Fauxbovirg 
St. Antoine, and other manufacturing districts 
of Paris, walked in regular military array, 
keeping the step in that procession: no one 
could see them without being astonished how 
the government survived the crisis. In truth, 
their existence hung by a thread ; — for several 
hours a feather would have cast the balance — 
established a republican government, and 
plunged Europe in an interminable war. Till 
six o'clock in the evening the insurgents were 
continually advancing; and, at that hour, they 
had made themselves masters of about one- 
half of Paris, including the whole district to 
the eastward of a line drawn from the Port 
St. Martin through the Hotel de Ville to the 
Pantheon. At the first alarm the government 
surrounded the Fauxbourg St. Antoine with 
troops, and would have perished, but for the 
fortunate cutting off of that great revolution- 
ary quarter from the scene of active prepa- 
rations. Though deprived of the expected 
co-operation in that district, however, the in- 
surgents bravely maintained the combat; they 
entrenched themselves in the neighbourhood 
of the cloister of St. Merri, and among the 
narrow streets of that densely peopled quarter, 
maintained a doubtful struggle. The minis- 
ters, in alarm, sent for the king, with intelli- 
gence that his crown was at stake : above 
sixty thousand men, with an immense train of 
artillery, were brought to the spot; but still 
the issue seemed suspended. The National 
Guard of the city, for the most part, hung 
back; the cries of others were openly in 
favour of the insurgents; if a single battalion, 
either of the line or the National Guard, at 
that crisis had openly joined the rebels, all 
was lost. In this extremity a singular circum- 
stance changed the fortune of the day, and 
fixed his tottering crown on the head of Louis 
Philippe. The little farmers round Paris, who 
live by sending their milk and vegetables to 
the capital, found their business suspended by 
the contest which was raging in the centre 
of the city, where the markets for their pro- 
duce are held; their stalls and paniers were 
seized by the rebels, and run up into barri- 
cades. Enraged at this invasion of their pro- 
perty and stoppage of their business, these 
little dealers joined their respective banners, 
and hastened with the National Guard of the 
Banlieue to the scene of action : they were 
plentifully supplied with wine and spirits on 
the outside of the barrier; and before the ex- 
citation had subsided, were hurried over the 
barricades, and determined the conflict. In its 
last extremity the crown of Louis Philippe 
was saved, neither by his boasted guards, nor 
the civic force of the metropolis, but the anger 
of a body of hucksters, gardeners, and milk- 
dealers, roused by the suspension of their 
humble occupations. 

It is this peculiarity in the situation of the 
French government which renders it neces- 
sary to watch the state of parties in Paris 
with such intense anxiety, and renders the 
strife in its streets the signal for peace or war 
all over the civilized world. The government 
of France, despotic as it is over the remainder 
of the country, is entirely at the mercy of the 



metropolis. Having no root in the provinces, 
being based on no great interests in the state, 
it depends entirely on the armed force of the 
capital — a well organized emeute, the defection 
of a single regiment of guards, a few seditious 
cries from the National Guard, the sight of a 
favourite banner, a fortunate allusion to heart- 
stirring recollections, may at any moment con- 
sign it to destruction. If the insurgents of the 
city of Paris can make themselves masters of 
the Hotel de Ville, France is more than half 
conquered ; if their forces are advanced to the 
Marche des Innocens, the throne is in greater 
danger than if the Rhine had been crossed by 
two hundred thousand men : but if their flag 
is hoisted on the Tuileries, the day is won, and 
France, with its eighty-four departments and 
thirty-two millions of inhabitants, is at the 
disposal of the victorious faction. If the rebels 
who sold their lives so dearly in the cloister 
of St. Merri could have openly gained over to 
their side one regiment, and man3 r only waited 
an example to join their colours, they would 
speedily have been in possession of the trea- 
sury, and the telegraph, and France was at 
their feet. No man knew this peculiarity in 
the political situation of the great nation better 
than Napoleon. He was little disquieted by 
the failure of the Russian campaign, till intelli- 
gence of the conspiracy of Mallet reached his 
ears; and that firmness which the loss of four 
hundred thousand men could not shake, was 
overturned by the news that the rebels in 
Paris had imprisoned the minister of police, 
and were within a hair's breadth of making 
themselves masters of the telegraph. 

It is not surprising that Paris should have 
acquired this unbridled sovereignty over the 
rest of the country, if the condition in which 
the provinces have been left by the Revolution 
is considered. You travel through one of the 
departments — not a gentleman's house or a 
chateau is to be seen. As far as the eye can 
reach, the country is covered with sheets of 
grain, or slopes covered with vines or vege- 
tables, raised by the peasants who inhabit the 
villages, situated at the distance of a few miles 
from each other. Does this immense expanse 
belong to noblemen, gentlemen, or opulent 
proprietors capable of taking the lead in any 
common measures for the defence of the public 
liberties : On the contrary, it is partitioned 
out among an immense body of little proprie- 
tors, the great majority of whom are in a state 
of extreme poverty, and who are chained to 
the plough by the most imperious of all 
laws — that of absolute necessity. Morning, 
noon, and night, they are to be seen labouring 
in the fields, or returning weary and spent to 
their humble homes. Is it possible from such 
a class to expect any combined effort in favour 
of the emancipation of the provinces from the 
despotism of the capital? The thing is utter- 
ly impossible : as well might you look for an 
organized struggle for freedom among the 
serfs of Russia or the ryots of Hindostan. 

A certain intermixture of peasant proprie- 
tors is essential to the well-being of society ; 
and the want of such a class to a larger extent 
in England, is one of the circumstances most 
to be lamented in its social condition. But 
M 



134 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



there is a medium in all things. As much as 
the total want of little landowners is a serious 
evil, so much is the total want of any other 
class to be deprecated. In the time of the 
Duke de Gaeta, (1816,) that able statesman 
calculated that there were four millions of 
landed proprietors in France, and 14,000,000 
of souls constituting their families, independent 
of the wages of labour.* At present the num- 
ber is computed at twenty-five millions, and 
there are above ten millions of separate pro- 
perties enrolled and rated for taxation in the 
government book. Generally speaking, they 
occupy the whole land in the country. Here 
and there an old chateau, still held by a rem- 
nant of the old noblesse, is to be seen ; or 
a modern villa, inhabited in summer by an 
opulent banker from one of the great manu- 
facturing towns. But their number is too in- 
considerable, they are too far separated from 
each other, to have any weight in the political 
scale. France is, in fact, a country of peasants, 
interspersed with a few great manufacturing 
towns, and ruled by a luxurious and corrupted 
capital. 

Even the great manufacturing towns are 
incapable of forming any counterpoise to the 
power of the capital. They are situated too 
far from each other, they depend too complete- 
ly on orders from Paris, to be capable of 
opposing any resistance to its authority. If 
Rouen, Marseilles, Lyons, or Bourdeaux were 
to attempt the struggle, the central govern- 
ment would quickly crush each singly, before 
it could be aided by the other confederates. 
They tried to resist, under the most favourable 
circumstances, in 1793, when the Convention 
were assailed by all the powers of Europe, 
when two-thirds of France joined their league, 
and the west was torn by the Vendean war, 
and totally failed. Any repetition of the at- 
tempt is out of the question. 

The representative system, the boast of 
modern civilization, has been found by ex- 
perience to be incapable of affording any 
remedy for this universal prostration of the 
provinces. That system is admirably adapted 
for a country which contains a gradation of 
classes in society from the prince to the pea- 
sant; but it must always fail where the in- 
t?rmediate classes are destroyed, and there 
exist only the government and the peasantry. 
Where this is the case, the latter body will 
always be found incapable of resisting the in- 
fluence of the central authority. Who, in 
every age, from the signing of Magna Charta, 
have taken the lead in the support of English 
freedom? The barons, and great landed pro- 
prietors, who possessed at once the resolution, 
influence, and power of combination, which 
are indispensable to such an attempt. Even 
the Reform Bill, the last and greatest triumph 
of democratic ambition, was forced through 
the legislature, by the aid of a large and opu- 
lent portion of the aristocracy. If the Revo- 
lution of 1642 or 1688 had destroyed this in- 
termediate body in the state, the representa- 
tive system would speedily have fallen into 
contempt. The humble, needy representatives 

* Due de Gaeta, ii. 334. 



of humble and needy constituents would in 
the end have found themselves overshadowed 
by the splendour of the court, the power of 
the metropolis, or the force of the army. In 
periods of agitation, when the public mind is 
in a ferment, and the chief powers of the state 
pulled in one direction, they would have been 
irresistible; but in times of tranquillity, when 
the voice of passion was silent, and that of 
interest constantly heard, they would have 
certainly given waj. What is required in the 
representatives of the people, is a permanent 
resistance at all rimes to the various dangers 
which threaten the public freedom; in periods 
of democratic agitation, a firm resistance to 
precipitate innovation ; in times of pacific en- 
joyment, a steady disregard of government 
seduction. Human nature is weak, and we 
must not expect from any body of men, how- 
ever constituted, a steady adherence to duty 
under such circumstances of varied trial and 
difficulty; but experience has proved, that it 
may be expected, with some probability, among 
an aristocratic body, because their interests 
are permanent, and equally endangered by 
each set of perils; but that it is utterly chimeri- 
cal to look for it among the representatives of 
a body of peasants or little proprietors, un- 
mingled with any considerable intermixture 
of the higher classes of society. But the 
Revolution has extinguished these classes in 
France, and therefore it has not left the ele- 
ments out of which to frame a constitutional 
monarchy. 

These circumstances explain a fact singular- 
ly illustrative of the present state of parties in 
France, and the power to whom the ultimate 
appeal is made, viz. the eminent and illus- 
trious persons by whom the daily press is 
conducted. Every one knows by what class 
in society the daily press is conducted in Eng- 
land ; it is in the hands of persons of great 
ability, but in general of inferior grade in 
society. If the leading political characters do 
occasionally contribute an article, it is done 
under the veil of secrecy, and is seldom ad- 
mitted by the author, with whatever fame it 
may have been attended. But in France the 
case is quite the reverse. There the leading 
political characters, the highest of the nobles, 
the first men in the state, not only contribute 
regularly to the daily or periodical press, but 
avow and glory in their doing so. Not only 
the leading literary characters, as Chateau- 
briand, Guizot, Thiers, and others, regularly 
write for the daily press; but many of the 
Peers of France conduct, or contribute to, the 
public newspapers. The Gazette de France 
and Quotidienne are supported by contribu- 
tions from the royalist nobility; the Journal 
des Debats is conducted by a Peer of France. 
So far from being considered as a discredit, or 
a thing to be concealed, these eminent men 
pride themselves on the influence they thus 
have on public opinion. The reason is ob- 
vious ; they are the speakers before the real 
National Assembly of France, the National 
Guard and armed force of Paris. Considera- 
tion and dignity will ever attend the persons 
whose exertions directly lead to the possession 
of political power. When, in the progress of 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



135 



democratic changes, the Reformed Parliament 
of England has sunk as low in public estima- 
tion as the Chamber of Deputies in France, 
the dukes and earls of England, if such a 
class exist, will become the editors of news- 
papers, and pride themselves on the occupa- 
tion. 

The taxation of France is extremely heavy, 
and has been increased to a most extraordi- 
nary degree since the Revolution of July. In 
a table below,* will be found a return of the 
budgets of the last ten years, lately published 
in Paris by authority of government. From 
this it appears that the expenditure of the last 
year of Charles X., was 950,000,000 francs, 
or about £39,000,000 sterling, while that of 
the first year of Louis Philippe, was above 
1,500,000,000 francs, or £60,000,000. Thus, 
while the Three Glorious Days diminished 
every man's property by a third, it added to the 
national burdens by a half. Such are the 
blessings of democratic ascendency. 

The taxation of France has become an evil 
of the very greatest magnitude, and with every 
addition made to democratic power, it has be- 
come worse. The property-tax is thirteen per 
cent, on the annual value ; but by the arbitrary 
and unfair way in which valuations are taken, 
it frequently amounts to twenty, sometimes to 
thirty per cent, on what is really received by 
the proprietor. Professional persons, whose 
income is fluctuating, pay an income-tax on a 
graduated scale; and the indirect taxes bring 
in about 500,000,000 francs, or £20,000,000 
sterling. The direct taxes amount to about 
350,000,000 francs, or £14,000,000 sterling; a 
much heavier burden than the income-tax was 
on England, for the national income of Eng- 
land is much greater than that of France. As 
the result of their democratic efforts, the French 
have fixed on themselves national burdens, 
nearly three times as heavy as those which 
were so much complained of in the time of 
Louis XVI. ;f and greatly more oppressive 
than those which the revolutionary war has 
imposed on the English people. 

Nor is this all. In addition to this enormous 
increase of taxation, the Revolution of July has 
occasioned the sale of a very large portion of 
the royal domains. In every part of France 
the crown lands and forests have been alienated 
to a very great extent; and the words which so 
often meet a traveller's eyes, "Biens patrimo- 
niaux de la Couronne a vendre," indicate too 
clearly how universally the ruthless hand of 
the spoiler has been laid on the remaining 
public estates of the realm. 

Notwithstanding this, however, the charac- 
ter of the French government has been essen- 
tially changed by the Revolution of the Barri- 
cades. It possesses now a degree of power, 



* Budgets of France for the In 


st ten vears. 


1821 


951,992,000 francs, 


or £38,100.000 


1825 


916.098.000 do. 


37,100.000 


1828 


942,518.000 do. 


37,800,000 


1827 


986,527,000 do. 


38,730,000 


1828 


939.3-13.000 do. 


37,380,000 


1829 


975,703.000 do. 


38,840,000 


1830 


981,510.000 do. 


38,930,000 


1831 


1,511,500,000 do. 


oo.iioii.noo 


1832 


1,100,506,000 do. 


44,000.000 


1833 


1,120,391,000 do. 


44,500,000 


•f Tliey were then about £19,000,000 a year. 



vigour, and despotic authority, to which there 
has been nothing comparable since the days 
of Napoleon. The facility with which it over- 
tu ined the great democratic revolt at the cloister 
of St. Merri, in June, 1832, and at Lyons in No- 
vember, 1831, both of which were greatly more 
formidable than that of the Three Days, is a 
sufficient proof of this assertion. The deeds 
of despotism, the rigorous acts of government, 
which are now in daily operation under the 
citizen king, could never have been attempted 
during the restoration. Charles X. declared 
Paris in a state of siege, and issued an edict 
against the liberty of the press ; and in a few 
days, in consequence, he was precipitated from 
his throne : Marshal Soult declared Paris in a 
state of siege, and still more rigidly fettered 
the press ; and the act of vigour confirmed in- 
stead of weakening his sovereign's authority. 
It is the daily complaint of the republican 
press, that the acts of government are now 
infinitely more rigorous than they have ever 
been since the fall of Napoleon, and that the 
nation under the restoration would never have 
tolerated the vexatious restraints which are 
now imposed upon its freedom. To give one 
or two examples from the newspapers lying 
before us. 

" Yesterday evening, twenty-eight persons, 
accused of seditious practices, were arrested 
and sent to prison by the agents of the police. 
Never did tyranny advance with such rapid 
strides as it is doing at the present time." — 
Tribune, Aug. 20. 

" Yesterday night, eighteen more persons, 
accused of republican practices, were sent to 
prison. How long will the citizens of Paris 
permit a despotism to exist among them, to 
which there has been nothing comparable since 
the days of Napoleon V — Tribune, Aug. 21. 

" More barracks are in course of being 
erected in the neighbourhood of Graulle. If 
matters go on much longer at this rate, Paris 
will contain more soldiers than citizens." — 
Tribune, Aug. 23. 

If Charles X. or Louis XVIII. had adventured 
upon the extraordinary steps of sending state 
prisoners by the hundred to the castle of mount 
St. Michael in Normandy, or erecting an ad- 
ditional prison of vast dimensions near Pere 
la Chaise, to receive the overflowings of the 
other jails in Paris, maintaining forty or fifty 
thousand men constantly in garrison in the 
capital, or placing a girdle of fortified bastiles 
round its walls, the vehemence of the public 
clamour would either have rendered necessary 
the abandonment of the measures, or straight- 
way precipitated them from the throne. All 
parties now admit that France possessed as 
much real freedom as was consistent with 
public order under the Bourbons ; there is not 
one which pretends that any of that liberty is 
still enjoyed. They are completely at variance, 
indeed, as to the necessity of its removal ; the 
republicans maintaining that an unnecessary 
and odious despotism has been established ; 
the juste milieu, that a powerful government 
is the only remaining barrier between France 
and democratic anarchy, and, as such, is ab- 
solutely indispensable for the preservation of 
order; but all are agreed that the constitu- 



136 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



tional freedom of the Restoration no longer 
exists. 

An attentive observation of the present state 
of France is all that is requisite to show the 
causes of these apparently anomalous facts ; — 
of the tempered rule, limited authority, and 
constitutional sway of the Bourbons, in spite 
of the absolute frame of government which 
they received from Napoleon and the Revolu- 
tion ; and the despotic rigour and irresistible 
force of the present dynasty, notwithstanding 
the democratic transports which sealed it 
upon the throne. Such a survey will, at the 
same time, throw a great and important light 
upon the final effect of the first Revolution on 
the cause of freedom, and go far to vindicate 
the government of that superintending wis- 
dom, which, even in this world, compels vice 
to work out its own deserved and memorable 
punishment. 

The practical and efficient control upon the* 
executive authority, in every state, is to be 
found in the jealousy of the middling and 
lower orders of the rule of the higher, who are 
in possession of the reins of power. This is 
the force which really coerces the government 
in every state; it is to be found in the tumults 
of Constantinople, or the anarchy of Persia, as 
well as in the constitutional opposition of the 
British parliament. The representative system 
only gives a regular and constitutional channel 
to the restraining power, without which societv 
might degenerate into the anarchy of Poland, 
or be disgraced by the strife of the Seraglio. 

As longas this jealousy remains entire among 
the people, and the fabric of government is 
sufficiently strong to resist its attacks on any 
of its necessary functions — as long as it is a 
drag on its movements, not the ruling power, 
the operations of the executive are subjected 
to a degree of restraint which constitutes a 
limited monarchy, and diffuses general free- 
dom. This is the natural and healthful state of 
society; where the people, disqualified by their 
multitude and their habits from the task of 
government, fall into their proper sphere of 
observing and controlling its movements ; and 
the aristocracy, disqualified by their limited 
number from the power of effectually control- 
ling the executive, if possessed by the people, 
occupy their appropriate station in forming 
part of the government, and supporting the 
throne. The popular body is as unfit to go- 
vern the state, as the aristocracy is to defend 
its liberties against a democratic executive. 
History has many instances to exhibit, of li- 
berty existing for ages with a senate holding 
the reins, and a populace checking its en- 
croachments; it has not one to show of the 
same blessing being found under a democracy 
in possession of the executive, with the de- 
fence of public freedom intrusted to a displaced 
aristocracy. From the Revolution of 1688 to 
that of 1832, the annals of England presented 
the perfect specimen of public freedom flou- 
rishing under the first form of government; it 
remains to be seen whether it will subsist for 
any length of time under the second. 

Experience, accordingly, has demonstrated, 
what theory had long asserted, that the over- 
threw of the liberty of all free states has arisen 



from the usurpation of the executive authority 
by the democracy ; and that, as long as the 
reins of power are in the hands of the nobles, 
the jealousy of the commons was an adequate 
security to the cause of freedom. Rome long 
maintained its liberties, notwithstanding the 
contests of the patricians and plebeians, while 
the authority of the senate was unimpaired; 
but when the aristocracy, under Cato, Brutus, 
and Pompey, were overturned by the demo- 
cracy headed by Caesar, the tyranny of the 
emperors rapidly succeeded. The most com- 
plete despotism of modern times is to be found 
in the government of Robespierre and Napo- 
leon, both of whom rose ,to power on the de- 
mocratic transports of a successful revolution. 
Against the encroachments of their natural 
and hereditary rulers, the sovereign and the 
nobles, the people, in a constitutional mo- 
narchy, are in general sufficiently on their 
guard : and against their efforts, the increasing 
power which they acquire from the augmenta- 
tion of their wealth and intelligence in the 
later stages of society, is a perfectly sufficient 
security. But of the despotism of the rulers 
of their own party, — the usurpation of the 
leaders whom they have themselves seated in 
the chariot, — they are never sufficiently jea- 
lous, because they conceive that their own 
power is deriving fresh accessions of strength 
from every addition made to the chiefs who 
have so long combated by their side; and this 
delusion continues universally till it is too late 
to shake their authority, and on the ruins of a 
constitutional monarchy, an absolute despotism 
has been constructed. 

" Le leurre du despotisme qui commence est 
toujours," says Guizot, "d'ofFrir aux homines 
les trompeurs avantages d'une honteuse ega- 
lite."* 

Had the first Revolution of France, like the 
great rebellion of England, merely passed over 
the stale without uprooting all its institutions, 
and destroying every branch of its aristocracy, 
there can be little doubt that a constitutional 
monarchy might have been established in 
France, and possibly a hundred and forty 
years of liberty and happiness formed, as in 
Britain, the maturity of its national strength. 
But the total destruction of all these classes in 
the bloody convulsion, and the division of their 
estates among an innumerable host of little 
proprietors, rendered the formation of such a 
monarchy impossible, because one of the ele- 
ments was awanting which is indispensable to 
its existence, and no counterpoise remained to 
the power of the democracy at one time, or of 
the executive at another. You might as well 
make gunpowder without sulphur, as rear up 
constitutional freedom without an hereditary 
aristocracy to coerce the people and restrain 
the throne. "A monarchy," says Bacon, 
"without an aristocracy, is ever an absolute 
despotism, for a nobility attempers somewhat 
the reverence for the line royal." " The Revo- 
lution," says Napoleon, " left France absolutely 
without an aristocracy; and this rendered the 
formation of a mixed constitution impossible. 
The government had no lever to rest upon to 



* Guizot, Essais sur l'histoire de France, 13. 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



137 



direct the people; it was compelled to navi- restraint is ever most fervent, and from their 
gate in a single element. The French Revolu- energy that the firmest principles of freedom 
tion has attempted a problem as insoluble as and the greatest excesses of democracy have 
the direction of balloons!''* equally arisen. But the younger generations 

When Napoleon seized the helm, therefore, of France were, to a degree unprecedented in 
he had no alternative but to see revolutionary modern times, mowed down by the revolu- 
anarchy continue in the state, or coerce the tionary wars. After seventeen years of more 
people by a military despotism. He chose the than ordinary consumption of human life, 
latter; and under his firm and resolute go- 1 came the dreadful campaigns of 1812, 1813, 
vernment, France enjoyed a degree of prospe- ! and 1814 ; in the first of which, between Spain 
ritv and happiness unknown since the fall of j and Russia, not less than 700,000 men perish 



the monarchy. Those who reproach him with 
departing from the principles of the Revolution, 
and rearing up a military throne by means of 
a scaffolding of democratic construction, would 
do well to show how he could otherwise have 
discharged the first of duties in governments, — 
the giving protection and security to the peo- 
ple ; how a mixed and tempered constitution 
could be established, when the violence of the 
people had totally destroyed their natural and 
hereditary rulers ; and how the passions of a 
populace, long excited by the uncontrolled riot 
in power, were to be coerced by a senate com- 
posed of salaried dignitaries, destitute either 
of property or importance, and a body of 
ignoble deputies, hardly elevated, either in 
station or acquirements, above the citizens to 
whom they owed their election. 

The overthrow of Napoleon's power by the 
arms of Europe, for a time established a con- 
stitutional throne in France, and gave its in- 
habitants fifteen years of undeserved freedom 
and happiness. But this freedom rested on an 
unstable equilibrium; it had not struck its 
roots into the substratum of society; it was 
liable to be overturned by the first shock of 
adverse fortune. As it was, however, it con- 
tributed, in a most essential manner, to deceive 
the world, — to veil the irreparable conse- 
quences of the first convulsion, — and make 
mankind believe that it was possible, on the 
basis of irreligion, robbery, and murder, to 
rear up the fair fabric of regulated freedom. 
We have to thank the Revolution of the Bar- 
ricades for drawing aside the veil, — for dis- 
playing the consequences of national delin- 
quency on future ages ; and beneath the fair 
colours of the whited sepulchre, exhibiting the 
foul appearances of premature corruption and 
decay. 

What gave temporary freedom to France 
under the Restoration was the prodigious ex- 
haustion of the democratic spirit by the cala- 
mities which attended the close of Napoleon's 
reign ; the habits of submission to which his 
iron government had accustomed the people ; 
the terror produced by the double conquest of 
Paris by the Allies, the insecure and obnoxious 
tenure by which the Bourbons held their 
authority, and the pacific character and per- 
sonal weakness of that race of sovereigns 
themselves. 

1. The exhaustion of France by the calami- 
ties which hurled Napoleon from the throne 



ed by the sword or sickness, while, in the two 
latter, the extraordinary levy of 1,200,000 
men was almost entirely destroyed. By these 
prodigious efforts, France was literally ex- 
hausted; these copious bleedings reduced the 
body politic to a state of almost lethargic 
torpor; and, accordingly, neither the invasion 
and disasters of 1814, nor the return of Napo- 
leon in 1815, could rouse the mass of the 
nation to any thing like a state of general 
excitement. During the first years of the 
Bourbons' reign, accordingly, they had to rule 
over a people whose fierce passions had been 
tamed by unprecedented misfortunes, and hot 
blood drained off by a merciless sword ; and 
it was not till the course of time, and the 
ceaseless powers of population had in some 
degree repaired the void, that that general im- 
patience and restlessness began to be mani- 
fested which arises from the difficulty of 
finding employment, and is the common pre- 
cursor of political changes. 

2. The government of Napoleon, despotic 
and unfettered in its original construction, 
after the 18th Brumaire, had become, in pro- 
cess of time, the most arbitrary and powerful 
of any in Europe. Between the destruction 
of all ancient, provincial, and corporate au- 
thorities, by the successive revolutionary as- 
semblies, and the complete centralization of 
all the powers and influence of the state in the 
government at Paris, which took place during 
his government, there was not a vestige of 
popular power left in France. The people 
had been accustomed, for fourteen years, to 
submit to the prefets, sous-prefets, mayors, 
adjoints, and other authorities appointed by 
the central government at Paris, and they had 
in a great degree lost the recollection of the 
intoxicating powers which they exercised 
during the Revolution. The habit of submis- 
sion to an absolute government, which enforced 
its mandates by 800,000 soldiers, and had three 
hundred thousand civil offices in its gift, had 
in a great degree prepared the country for 
slavery. To the direction of this immense and 
strongly constructed machine the Bourbons 
succeeded; and it went on for a number of 
years working of itself, without the people ge- 
nerally being conscious of the helm having 
passed from the firm and able grasp of Napo- 
leon to the inexperienced and feeble hands of 
his legitimate successors. Louis XVIII., in- 
deed, gave a charter to his subjects : " Vive la 



undoubtedly had a most powerful effect in ; Charte" became the cry of the supporters of 
coercing for a time the fierce and turbulent | his throne : deputies were chosen, who met at 
passions of the people. It is in the young that j Paris ; a Chamber of Peers was established, 
the spirit of liberty and the impatience of j and the forms of a constitutional monarchy 

r ; prevailed. But it is not by conferring the 

* Napoleon's Memoirs. I forms of a limited monarchy that its spirit can 

18 m 2 



138 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



be acquired, or the necessary checks either on 
the throne or the populace established. France, 
under the Bourbons, went through the l'orrns 
of a representative govern men t,"but she had 
hardly a vestige of its spirit. Her people were 
composed of a few hundred thousand ardent 
citizens in the towns, who longed for demo- 
cratic power and a republican government, 
and thirty millions of peasants aud workmen, 
who were ready to submit to any government 
established by the ruling population of the 
capital. To coerce the former, or invigorate 
the latter, no means remained ; and therefore 
it is that a constitutional monarchy no longer 
exists in France. 

3. The consternation produced by the over- 
throw of Napoleon's throne, and the double 
occupation of Paris by the allied troops, went 
far to uphold a government which had risen 
up under their protection. While all the army 
and ardent patriots of the capital insisted that 
it had been surrendered by treachery in both 
cases, and could never have been conquered 
by force of arms, the astounding events pro- 
duced a great and awful impression through- 
out France, which is far from being as yet 
eradicated. There are some calamities which 
remain long in the recollection of mankind. 
Volatile, susceptible of new impressions, and 
inconsiderate as great part of the French un- 
doubtedly are, the successive capture of their 
capital in two campaigns sunk deep and 
heavily in their minds. It wounded them in 
the most sensitive part, the feeling of national 
glory; and excited a painful doubt, heretofore 
unknown, of the ability of the great nation to 
resist a combined attack from the northern 
powers. This feeling still subsists; it may 
have little influence with the young and war- 
like youth of the capital, but it is strongly im- 
pressed upon the more thoughtful and better 
informed classes of society, and is in an espe- 
cial manner prevalent among the National 
Guard of the metropolis, to whom, even more 
than the regular army, the nation looks for 
the regulation of its movements. It was to the 
prevalence of this feeling that the existence 
of the Bourbon government, during the fifteen 
years of the Restoration, was mainly owing; 
and so prevalent M-as it even, on the eve of 
their overthrow, that the revolt of the Barri- 
cades originated with, and was long supported 
solely by the very lowest classes ; and it was 
not till the defection of the army, and the im- 
becility of the government, had rendered it 
more than doubtful whether a revolution was 
not at hand, that they were joined by any 
considerable accession of strength from the 
educated or middling classes of society. The 
same feeling of secret dread at the northern 
powers still exists, notwithstanding the acces- 
sion of England to the league of revolutionary 
governments; and, whatever the republican 
party may say to the contrary, nothing is more 
certain than that the cabinet of Louis Philippe 
has been supported in all its principal mea- 
sures, and especially in the proclamation of a 
state of siege by Marshal Soult, and the pacific 
system with the continental powers, by a great 
majority of all the persons of any wealth or 
consideration in Paris, now in possession, 



through the National Guard, of a preponderat- 
ing influence in the capital, and, consequently, 
over all France. 

The circumstances which have been men- 
tioned, contributed strongly to establish a des- 
potic government under the Bourbons,— the 
only kind of regular authority which the con- 
vulsions of the Revolution have rendered 
practicable in France ; but to counteract 
these, and temper the rigour of the execu- 
tive, there were other circumstances of an 
equally important character, which gradually 
went on increasing in power, until they finally 
overbalanced the others, and overturned the 
government of the Restoration. 

1. The first of these circumstances was the 
extreme national dissatisfaction which attend- 
ed the way in which the Bourbons reascended 
the throne. For a monarch of France to enter 
its capital, in the rear of a victorious invader, 
is the most unlikely way that can be imagined 
to gain the affections of its inhabitants ; but to 
do this twice over, and regain the throne on 
the second occasion, in consequence of such 
a thunderbolt as the battle of Waterloo, was a 
misfortune which rendered the popularity of 
the dynasty out of the question. The people 
naturally connected together the two events ; 
they associated the republican sway with the 
tricolour flag and the conquest of Europe, and 
the Bourbon dynasty with the disasters which 
had preceded their restoration : forgetting, what 
was the truth, that it was under the tricolour 
that all these disasters had been incurred ; and 
that the white flag was the olive branch 
which saved them from calamities, which they 
themselves had felt to be intolerable. 

This general feeling of irritation at the un- 
paralleled calamities in which Napoleon's 
reign terminated, was naturally and skilfully 
turned to account by the republican party. 
They constantly associated together the Bour- 
bon reign with the Russian bayonets; and 
held out the sovereigns of the Restoration, ra- 
ther as the viceroys of Wellington, or the 
satraps of Alexander, than the monarchs 
either by choice or inheritance of the Franks. 
This prejudice, which had too much support 
from theunfortunate coincidence of Napoleon's 
disasters with the commencement of their 
reign, soon spread deeply and universally 
among the liberal part of the people ; and the 
continuance of the Bourbon dynasty on the 
throne came to be considered as the badge of 
national servitude, which, on the first dawn 
of returning liberation, should be removed. 

2. The abolition of the national colours by 
the Bourbon princes, and the studious endea- 
vour made to obliterate the monuments and 
recollection of Napoleon, was a puerile weak- 
ness, from which the worst possible effects en- 
sued to their government. To suppose that it 
was possible to obliterate the remembrance 
of his mighty achievements, and substitute 
Henry IV. and Saint Louis for the glories of 
the empire, was worse than childish, and, as 
might have been expected, totally ineffectual. 
In vain his portrait was prescribed, his letters 
effaced from the edifices, his name hardly 
mentioned, except with vituperation by the 
ministerial organs; the admiration for his 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



139 



greatness only increased from the efforts made 
to suppress it; and of his, as the images of 
Brutus and Cassius at the funeral of Junia, it 
might truly be said, "Viginti clarissimarum 
familiarum imagines antelatse. sunt, sed pra?- 
fulgebant Cassius atque Brutus, et eo ipso 
quod effigies eorum tion videbantur." 

The universal burst of public enthusiasm 
when the tricolour Hag was rehoisted on the 
Tuileries, and the statue of the hero replaced 
on the pillar in the Place Vendome, in July 
last, and the innumerable pictures and statues 
which have been exposed in every town and 
village of France since the prohibition was 
removed, demonstrate how powerful and gene- 
ral this feeling was, and expose the enormity 
of the error which the Bourbons committed 
in endeavouring to bury it in oblivion. The 
tricolour flag was associated in the minds of 
the whole young and active part of the French 
population with the days of their glory; the 
white standard with the commencement of 
their humiliation. To compel them to adopt 
the one and abandon the other, was an error 
in policy of the most enormous kind. It was 
to perpetuate the feeling of national disgrace; 
to impose upon the nation what they con- 
sidered as the livery of servitude; to debar 
them from openly giving vent to feelings 
which swelled their hearts even to bursting. 
The Revolution of July was less against the 
edicts of Polignac than the white standard on 
the dome of the Tuileries ; and the Citizen 
King owes his throne mainly to the tricolour 
flag which waves above his head in that au- 
gust abode. 

3. The religious feelings of the exiled fam- 
ily, natural and estimable in persons exposed 
to the calamities which they had undergone, 
was undoubtedly an inherent weakness in the 
government of the Restoration, to which their 
fall was in a great degree owing. From what- 
ever cause it may have arisen, the fact is cer- 
tain, that hatred at every species of religious 
observance is the most profound and invete- 
rate feeling which has survived the Revolution. 
Not that the French are wholly an irreligious 
people ; for in a numerous portion of the 
community, especially in the rural districts, 
the reverence for devotion is undiminished, 
nay, is now visibly on the increase ; but that 
the active and energetic class in towns, upon 
whom the centralization of power produced 
by the Revolution has exclusively conferred 
political importance and the means of influ- 
encing the public mind, are almost entirely of 
that description. To these men, the sight of 
priests in their sacerdotal habits crossing the 
Place Carousal, and entering the royal apart- 
ments, was absolute gall and wormwood. The 
royalists had not discernment enough to see, 
that they might encourage the substantial parts 
of religion, without perpetually bringing be- 
fore the public eye the obnoxious parts of its 
external ceremonial : they fell at once under 
the government of pious and estimable, but 
weak and ignorant ecclesiastics, who were 
totally incapable of steering the vessel of the 
state through the shoals and quicksands with 
which it was on all sides beset. Thence arose 
an inherent weakness in the government of 



the Restoration, which went far to counter- 
balance the vast political authority which the 
centralization of every species of influence in 
the public offices in Paris had occasioned. 
They received a machine of vast power, and 
apparently irresistible strength, but the preju- 
dice of the people at their political and reli- 
gious principles was so strong that they could 
not find the firm hands requisite to direct it. 

4. The pacific and indolent character of the 
Bourbon princes, and the timorous policy 
which they were constrained to adopt, from the 
disastrous circumstances which had preceded 
their accession to the throne, prevented them 
from reviving by personal qualities or brilliant 
achievements, any of that popularity which 
so many circumstances had contributed to 
weaken. A thirst for military glory ever has 
been the leading characteristic of the French 
people. A pacific and popular king of France 
is a contradiction in terms. The princes who 
dwell most strongly in their recollection, 
Henry IV., Louis XIV., and Napoleon, were 
all distinguished either for their military 
achievements, or the great conquests which 
were effected in their reign. If a king of 
France were to possess the virtue of Aristides, 
the integrity of Cato, the humanity of Marcus 
Aurelius, and the wisdom of Solomon, and re- 
main constantly at peace, he would speedily 
become unpopular.* The only regal activity 
which, in their estimation, can in some degree 
compensate the want of military distinction, 
is a decided turn for the embellishment of 
Paris. Napoleon's vast popularity, after his 
external victories, was mainly owing to his 
internal decorations; the Pillar of Austerlitz 
and the Bourse, almost rivalled, in public 
effect, the overthrow of Austria and the sub- 
jugation of Prussia. But in neither of these 
lines of activity was the family of the Restora- 
tion calculated to acquire a distinction. They 
remained, partly from inclination, partly from 
necessity, almost constantly at peace ; they 
languidly and slowly completed the great works 
undertaken by Napoleon, but commenced little 
new themselves; they neither pushed their 
armies across the Rhine, nor their new con- 
structions into the obscurer parts of Paris. 
The Parisians could neither recount to stran- 
gers the victories they had won, nor point with 
exultation to the edifices they had constructed. 
They remained, in consequence, for the whole 
fifteen years that they sat upon the throne, 
tolerated and obeyed, but neither admired nor 
loved; and the load of obloquy which attached 
to them from the disasters which preceded 
their accession, was lightened by no redeem- 
ing achievements which followed their eleva- 
tion. 

From the combination of these singular and 
opposing circumstances, there resulted a mixed 
and tempered government in France, for the 
brief period of the Restoration, without any 
of the circumstances existing, by which that 
blessing can be permanently secured, — without 
either a powerful aristocracy, or an efficient 
and varied representation of the people. The 
machine of government was that of an abso- 

*Mr. Burke was perfectly right when he said, that the 
restored monarch must be constantly in the saddle. 



140 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



lute despotism, from the complete centraliza- 
tion of every species of influence in the public 
offices at Paris, and the total absence of any 
authority in the provinces to counterbalance 
their influence; but the royal family had 
neither the energy nor the qualities, nor the 
fortune, requisite to wield its irresistible pow- 
ers. Nothing can be more extraordinary, ac- 
cordingly, than the state of France under 
Louis XVIII. and Charles X. The government 
were almost constantly declining in popularity; 
the republican majority in the Chamber of 
Deputies was, with some variations, almost 
constantly increasing; at last it rose to such a 
height as to choke up the wheels of adminis- 
tration, and render a coup d'etat, or a resignation 
of the throne, an unavoidable alternative. But 
although the Family of the Bourbons was thus 
declining in influence,' the power of government 
was undergoing no serious alteration; no 
efficient checks upon the executive, arising 
from the combination of the lasting interests 
of the state to coerce its encroachment, were 
growing up ; the weakness of the throne arose 
from dislike to the reigning family, not aver- 
sion to the power with which they were in- 
vested. They were at last overturned, like the 
sultans in the Seraglio, or the Roman em- 
perors on the Palatine Mount, by a vast and 
well-concerted urban tumult, seconded to a 
wish by the imbecility and weakness of the 
ruling administration; and the vast machine 
of a despotic government passed unimpaired 
into the hands of their more energetic assail- 
ants. 

The Revolution of the Barricades at once 
put an end to the temporizing system of the 
Restoration, and drew aside the veil which, re- 
tained by Bourbon weakness, had so long con- 
cealed the stern features of despotic power. 
The fatal succession, bequeathed to France, 
by the sins and the atrocities of the first Revo- 
lution, was then apparent; the bonds, the 
inevitable and perpetual bonds of servitude, 
were exposed to public gaze. In all the par- 
ticulars which constituted the weakness of the 
Restoration, and paralyzed the machine of des- 
potic government, from hatred at the hands 
which wielded it, the Citizen King had the 
advantage. The white flag had been a per- 
petual eye-sore to the ardent youth of France, 
and the white flag was torn down : the tricolour 
had been the object of their secret worship, 
and the tricolour was displayed from every 
tower in France: the recollection of defeat had 
clouded the first days of the Restoration, and 
the first days of the Revolution of July were 
those of astounding triumph : the observance 
of Sunday and religious forms had exasperated 
an mfidel metropolis, under a priest-ridden 
dynasty; and their successors allowed them 
to revel in every species of amusement and 
license on the seventh day: the long con- 
tinuance of peace had thrown into sullen dis- 
content the ardent youth of the metropolis ; 
and the establishment of a revolutionary throne 
promised, sooner or later, to bring about a 
desperate conflict with the legitimate monarchs 
of Europe. The prospect of the convulsions 
into which England was speedily thrown by 
the contagion of this great example, contri- 



buted not a little to fan this exulting flame; 
and in the passing of the Reform Bill, the 
French democrats beheld a lasting triumph to 
the Gallican party in this country, and an 
achievement which consoled them for the 
disasters of Trafalgar and Waterloo. 

These combined circumstances completely 
restored the vigour and efficiency of the cen- 
tral authority at Paris over all France. In 
possession of a frame of government the 
strongest and most despotic of any in Europe, 
supported by the ardent and influential part 
of the population in the capital, fanned by the 
gales of public passion and prejudice, they 
speedily became irresistible. Every thing con- 
tributed to increase the power of government. 
The public hatred at hereditary succession, 
which forced on the abolition of the House of 
Peers and the appointment of their successors 
by the crown, demolished the last barrier (and 
it was but a feeble one) which the preceding 
convulsions had left between the throne and 
universal dominion. The public impatience 
for war, which made them bear without mur- 
muring an increase of the national expendi- 
ture, on the accession of Louis Philippe, from 
980,000.000 francs to 1,511,000,000 in one year, 
enabled the government to raise the army from 
180,000 to 420,000 men, and fan the military 
spirit through all France, by the establishment 
of National Guards. The Chamber of Depu- 
ties, thrown into the shade by the tricolour 
flag, and the reviews in the Place Carousel, 
was soon forgotten ; its members, destitute, for 
the most part, of property, consideration, or 
weight in their respective departments, speedily 
fell into contempt; the opposition was gained 
over or withdrew in despair from a hopeless 
cause ; and a party which, under the white 
flag, and the priest-ridden government, had 
risen to .a majority in the legislature, was soon 
reduced to a miserable remnant of six or eight 
members. The debates in the Chamber have 
almost disappeared ; they are hardly ever re- 
ported; all eyes are turned from the legisla- 
ture to the war-office; from the declamations 
of disappointed patriots, to the acclamations 
of brilliant battalions; from a thought on the 
extinction of public freedom, to the exhilarating 
prospect of foreign conquest. 

It is this combination of a despotic executive 
in possession of all the influence in the state, 
with the infusion of popularity into the sys- 
tem of government, which has enabled Louis 
Philippe, aided by his own great ability, not- 
withstanding his extreme personal unpopularity, 
to carry through obnoxious and tyrannical 
measures never contemplated by Napoleon in 
the zenith of his power. One of the most re- 
markable of these, is the encircling Paris with 
fortified posts, or, as the republicans call it, the 
project " d'embastiller Paris." To those who 
recollect the transports of enthusiasm with 
which the storming of the Bastile was re- 
ceived over all France in 1789, it must appear 
the most^ extraordinary of all things, that 
a revolutionary government should venture 
upon the step of constructing Ten Bastiles, 
many larger, all stronger, than the old one, 
around Paris, in such situation, as absolutely 
to command the metropolis, by enabling the 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



141 



government, at pleasure, to intercept its sup- 
plies of provisions; yet this has been done, 
and is now doing. Vincennes, situated a 
league beyond the Barricade de Trone, is 
undergoing a thorough repair; and its cannon, 
placed within a regular fortification, will com- 
pletely command the great road leading into 
the Fauxbourg St. Antoine. Other, and simi- 
lar fortresses, are in the course of construction, 
in a circle round Paris, at the distance of about 
two miles from each other, and a mile, or a 
mile and a half beyond the external barrier. 
When completed, they will at once give the 
government the command of the rebellious 
capital; not a pound of provisions can enter a 
circle inhabited by nearly a million of souls, 
but under the guns of these formidable for- 
tresses. The plans were completed, the ground 
was all purchased, the works were going for- 
ward, when they were interrupted by the cries 
of part of the National Guard, in defiling be- 
fore the king on the 29th July last. The 
Chamber of Deputies had in vain refused, in 
accordance with the wishes of the capital, a 
grant of money for the purpose ; the crown 
was going on of its own authority, and from 
its own funds. And though the undertaking 
has been suspended for a time from the cause 
above mentioned, excepting at Vincennes, 
which is rapidly advancing, government openly 
announce their intention of resuming it next 
spring, when a majority of the Chamber will 
be won over to give it their support.* 

The most singular circumstance connected 
with the present political state of France, is 
the co-existence of a despotic military govern- 
ment, with a wild and intemperate republican 
press in the capital. This may appear in- 
credible, hut nevertheless it is certain that it 
exists ; and it constitutes an element by no 
means to be overlooked, in considering its 
future prospects, because it may, in a moment, 
hurl the present dynasty from the throne, and 
elevate a new family, or different executive, to 
the possession of its despotic powers. To give 
only a single example of the length to which 
this extravagance is carried, we select by mere 
chance, an article which recently appeared in 
the Tribune. 

" Those who place themselves in the current 
of political change should consider well whither 
it will lead them, before they embark on its 
waves. The authors of the revolt on the 9th 
Thermidor.f were far from intending to extin- 
guish public freedom ; but, nevertheless, the 
reaction against liberty has been incessant 
since the fall of Robespierre, with the excep- 
tion perhaps of the Three Days of July. 

"It is in vain to say that it was Napoleon, 
or the Restoration, or Louis Philippe, who ex- 
tinguished the freedom of France: it was the 
overthrow of Robespierre which was the fatal 
stroke. We have never since known what 
liberty was, we have lived only under a suc- 
ce -ion of tyrants. 

" Impressed with these ideas, a band of pa- 
triots have commenced the republication of the 



* It lias since heen completed by the aid of the war 
party, headed by M. Thiers. 
■f-The day when Robespierre was overthrown. 



speeches of Robespierre, St. Just, and Marat, 
which will be rendered accessible to the very 
humblest of the people, by the moderate price 
of a sous a number, at which it is to be sold. 
We earnestly recommend the works of these 
immortal patriots to our readers. They will 
find every thing that philosophy could discover, 
or learning reveal, or humanity desire, or elo- 
quence enforce, in their incomparable produc- 
tions." — Tribune, Aug. 20. 

Again, in the next number we read as fol- 
lows : — 

"The soi-disant patriots of the day are in a 
total mistake when they pretend that it is an 
erroneous system of taxation which is the root 
of the public discontents. This is no doubt 
an evil, but it is nothing compared to that 
which flows from a defective system of social 
organization. 

" The tyranny of the rich over the poor is 
the real plague which infests society; the eter- 
nal source of oppression, in comparison of 
which all others are but as dust in the balance. 
What have we gained by the Revolution T The 
substitution of the Chausee d'Antin for the 
Fauxbourg St. Germain. An aristocracy of 
bankers for one of nobles. What have the 
people gained by this change"! Are they bet- 
ter fed, or clothed, or lodged, than before 1 
What is it to them that their oppressors are 
no longer counts or dukes'? Tyranny can 
come from the bureau as well as the palace: — 
there will be no real regeneration to France 
till a more equal distribution of property 
strikes at the root of all the calamities of 
mankind. 

"The principles of pure and unmixed de- 
mocracy are those of absolute wisdom, of 
unwearied philanthropy, of universal happi- 
ness. When the rule of the people is com- 
pletely established, the reign of justice, free- 
dom, equality, and happiness will commence ; 
all the evils of humanity will disappear before 
the awakened energies of mankind." — Tribune, 
Aug. 21. 

When principles such as these, clothed in 
insinuating language, and enforced with no 
small share of ability, are daily poured forth 
from the Parisian press, and read by admiring 
multitudes among its ardent and impassioned 
population, we are led to examine how society 
can exist with such doctrines familiarly spread 
among the lower orders. Cut the phenomenon 
becomes still more extraordinary, when it is 
perceived that these anarchical doctrines are 
in close juxtaposition to the most complete 
and rigorous despotism to which the people 
under successive governments submit without 
any practical attempt at resistance ; that the 
citizens who indulge in these absurd specu- 
lations are content to wait for hours at the 
police office, before they can go ten leagues 
from the capital, and go quietly to jail with 
the first gens d'armes who meet them on the 
road without their passports. 

The truth is, that the French, during all the 
phases of the Revolution, as Napoleon re- 
marked, not only never tasted one hour of real 
freedom, but never formed a conception of 
what it was. The efforts of the factions who 
for forty years have torn its bosom, have all 



142 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



been directed to one object, the acquisition of 
political power by themselves, without bestowing 
a thought on the far more important matter 
of how that power is to be restrained towards 
others. The consequence is, that the exertions 
of the party in opposition are all directed to 
one object, the displacing of their adversaries 
from their places in administration, or over- 
turning the family on the throne, without the 
slightest intention of remodelling the frame of 
government, so as to impose any effectual 
check on the executive. If the republican 
opposition were to succeed to the helm, they 
would probably push through such a change 
in the composition of the electoral colleges, as 
might secure for their party the predominance 
in the legislature, but they would make as few 
concessions to public freedom as was done by 
their predecessors Robespierre and St. Just. 
The police would still fetter the actions of 
every man in France; the impot foncicre would 
still carry off from thirteen to twenty per cent, 
of every income from property; the govern- 
ment officers at Paris would still dispose of 
every office in the kingdom, from the minister 
at the head of the army, to the scavenger at 
the tail of the cleaning department. 

The party in opposition, who long for the 
enjoyment of power and offices, has been im- 
mensely weakened by the result of the Three 
Days. The royalists, indeed, are everywhere 
excluded from the slightest participation in the 
government; but so are they from any in- 
fluence in the legislature; and a miserable 
minority of twenty or thirty members finds it 
quite in vain to attempt any struggle in par- 
liament. The great body of the popular party 
have got into office in consequence of their 
triumph : it may safely be affirmed that not 
less than 300,000 liberals are now the employes 
in civil government alone. Thus the patriots 
of France are now very generally and com- 
fortably ensconced in official situations; and 
it is utterly impossible, in consequence, to 
rouse them to any hostility to the ruling power. 
In this way the republican party are, to a great 
extent, won over to the government, and they 
can afford to allow the disappointed remnant 
of their faction to vent their discontent in de- 
mocratic publications. This complete division 
of the liberal party, and secure anchoring of 
four-fifths of its members by the strong tenure 
of official emolument, which has followed the 
Revolution of July, is the true secret of the 
present strength of government; for the dis- 
contented royalists in the provinces, though 
numerous and brave, will never be able to 
throw off the central authority of the capital. 

It is not to be imagined, however, from all 
this, that the government of Louis Philippe is 
established on a solid foundation. No govern- 
ment can be so, which is founded not on the 
great and lasting interests of the state, but its 
fleeting passions — which depends not on the 
property of the country, but the mob of the 
metropolis. The throne of the Barricades 
rests entirely on the armed force of the capital. 
" A breath may unmake it, as a breath has 
made." A well-concerted urban revolt, the 
defection of a single regiment, supported by a 
majority of the National Guards, may any day 



seat a consul, a general, or Henry V. on the 
throne. It has lost popularity immensely with 
the movement party, out of office, comprehend- 
ing all the ardent and desperate characters, by 
persisting in an anti-republican policy, and 
remaining steadily at peace. Its incessant 
and rigorous prosecution of the press, though 
inadequate hitherto to extirpate that last re- 
main of popular sovereignty, has exposed it to 
the powerful assaults of that mighty engine. 
The sovereign on the throne, and the whole 
royal family, are neglected or disliked, not- 
withstanding the great abilities of its head and 
estimable qualities of many of its members. 
A vigorous and successful foreign war would 
at once restore its popularity, and utterly 
silence all the clamour about the loss of free- 
dom ; but without the aid of that powerful 
stimulant, it is impossible to say how soon the 
present dynasty may be overturned, and a 
fresh race or government be thrown up by an- 
other eruption of the revolutionary volcano. 

But come what race or form of sovereignty 
there may, the government of Paris will equally 
remain a perfect and uncontrolled despotism 
over France. This is the great and final re- 
sult of the first Revolution, which should ever 
be kept steadily in view by the adjoining states. 
Let Henry V. or the Duke of Orleans, Marshal 
Soult, or Odillon Barrot, succeed to supreme 
power, the result will be the same. The bones 
of Old France have been broken by the vast 
rolling-stone which has passed over the state; 
New France has not the eiements within it to 
frame a constitutional throne. The people 
must remain slaves to the central government, 
because they have destroyed the superior classes 
who might shield them from its oppression. 
Asiatic has succeeded to European civilization, 
and political power is no longer to be found 
independent of res'al appointment. All supe- 
riority depends upon the possession of office; 
the distinctions of hereditary rank, the descent 
of considerable property, have alike disap- 
peared; over a nation of ryots, who earn a 
scanty subsistence by the sweat of their brow, 
is placed a horde of Egyptian taskmasters, 
who wring from them the fruits of their toil, 
and a band of Praetorian guards who dispose 
at pleasure of their government. 

In one particular, little understood on the 
English side of the Channel, the similarity of 
the result of French regeneration to the in- 
stitutions of Oriental despotism, is most strik- 
ing. The weight of direct taxation is at once 
the mark and the result of despotic govern- 
ment. It is remarked by Gibbon, that the great 
test of the practical power of government is 
to be found in the extent to which it can carry 
the direct payments by the people to the treasury ; 
and that whenever the majority of imposts are 
indirect, it is a proof that it is compelled to 
consult the inclinations and feelings of its sub- 
jects. He adduces as an illustration of this 
profound yet obvious remark, (all profound 
remarks, when once made, appear obvious,) 
the excessive weight of direct taxation in the 
latter period of the Roman empire. In Gaul, 
in the time of Constantine, the capitaticn-tax 
had risen to the enormous sum of nine pounds 
sterling for every freeman ; an impost so ex- 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



143 



cessive, that among the poorer citizens it could 
be made up only by several being allowed to 
club together to form one head. Sismondi, in 
like manner, observes, that the exorbitant 
weight of direct taxes was the great cause of 
the progressive depopulation of the Roman 
empire. At this moment the burden of the 
fixed payment exacted from a Turkish pashalic 
which is never allowed to diminish, and con- 
sequently with the decline of the inhabitants 
becomes intolerable, is the great cause of the 
rapid depopulation of the Ottoman empire. 
In Hindostan and China, the proportion of the 
fruits of the soil which goes directly to the 
government varies from 30 to 50 per cent. 

Akin to this, the last and well-known result 
of despotic oppression, is the enormous weight 
of the direct taxes in France. The tax on 
proprietors is fixed at present at \Z per cent.: 
but this, oppressive as it would appear in this 
country, where the weight of democratic des- 
potism is only beginning to be felt, is nothing 
to the real burden which falls on the unhappy 
proprietors. By the valuation or cadastre made 
by the government surveyor, the real weight 
of the burden is liable to indefinite increase, 
and in general brings it up to 20, sometimes 
30 per cent.* The valuation is taken, not 
from the actual receipt of the owner, but what 
it is estimated his property is worth ; and as 
the smiles of government are directed towards 
these official gentlemen nearly in proportion 
to the amount to which they can raise the 
valuation of their district, the injustice com- 
mitted in this way is most extreme. We know 
many properties on the Garonne and Rhone, 
where, from the exorbitance of the valuation, 
the tax comes to 35 and 40 per cent, on the 
produce. Its weight may be judged of by the 
fact, that this direct impost produces yearly 
350,000,000 francs, or about 14,000,000/. ster- 
ling, which almost entirely comes from the 
land-owners. f Now the income-tax of Great 
Britain during the war produced just that sum ; 
and most certainly the income from all sources 
of the British empire at that period was double 
the amount of that now enjoyed by the landed 
proprietors of France.t The result of this is, 
that the French land-owners pay, on the whole, 
20 per cent, on the annual worth of their in- 
comes. In forty years from the commencement 
of their revolutionary troubles, the French 
have got nearly to the standard fixed on the 
ryots of Hindostan, in the lightest taxed dis- 
tricts of India; and more than tripled the tailk, 
which was held forth as an insupportable 
burden at their commencement ! Let them go 
on as they are doing, and in half a century 
they will again find the enormous capitation- 



* From the infinite subdivision of land in France, and 
the continual change of hands through which it passes, 
it in fact belongs in property to no one individual, but to 
the Public Treasury, from the excessive weight of direct 
taxation and the duties on alienations of any kind. — 
Donnadieu, 256. 

■J-Dupin estimates the income of proprietors in France 
nt 1,626,000,000 francs, or 65.000,000*., so that if 350,000,000 
francs, or 14,000,000*. sterling, is taken from them in 
the form of direct taxes,the burden is as 14 to 66 on their 
whole income, or 21 per cent.— See DuriN, Force Cum- 
merciale de France, ii. 266. 

J The income of official persons is taken at a different 
rate, varying from 6£ to 8 per cent. ; but it forms a trifling 
part of the direct taxation. 



tax of Constantine fixed about their necks. 
Thus the result of human folly and iniquity is 
the same in all ages and countries ; and the 
identical consequences which flowed fifteen 
hundred years ago, remotely but surely, from 
the madness of Gracchus and the democrats 
of Rome, in destroying the Roman aristocracy, 
is evidently approaching, though with infinite- 
ly swifter steps from the corresponding mad- 
ness of the French republicans in extirpating 
the higher classes of their monarchy. 

We have often asked the proprietors in dif- 
ferent parts of France, why they did not en- 
deavour to diminish or equalize this enormous 
burden, which, in the wine provinces especial- 
ly, is felt as so oppressive 1 They universally 
answered, that the thing was impossible; that 
they had memorialized Napoleon and Louis 
XVIII., the Chamber of Deputies and Peers, 
Villele and the Due de Richelieu, but all to no 
purpose. The weight of the impot fonciere, 
the injustice of the cadastre, remains unchanged 
and unchangeable. Four or five millions of 
little proprietors, scattered over the vast ex- 
panse of France, a majority of whom have not 
51. yearly from their land, can effect nothing 
against the despotic central government of 
Paris. They themselves say, that the direct 
burdens on the land are becoming so excessive, 
that the sovereign is, as in Oriental dynasties, 
the real proprietor, and they are but tenants who 
labour for his benefit more than their own. 
Herein may be discerned the hand of Provi- 
dence, causing the sins of men to work out 
their own punishment. If the French people 
had not committed the frightful injustice of 
confiscating the property of their nobles and 
clergy, they would now haA r e possessed within 
themselves a vast body of influential proprie- 
tors, capable, as in England, under the old 
Constitution, either in the Upper or Lower 
House, of preventing or arresting the oppres- 
sion of the central government, and the enor- 
mous burden of 20 per cent, directly laid on 
land would never have been permitted. But 
proceeding, as they have done, by destroying 
all the intermediate classes in the state, and 
leaving only government employes and peasant 
proprietors, they have cut away the shield 
which would have protected the poor from the 
vexation of the central authority, and left them- 
selves and their children for ever exposed to 
its oppression. They imagined that by laying 
hold of the land of others, they would step into 
the comforts and opulence of separate proper- 
ty; but the wages of iniquity seldom prosper 
in the end, either in nations or individuals. 
They have fallen in consequence under an 
oppressive taxation, which has more than 
counterbalanced all the advantages of the spoil 
they have acquired; the sovereign has grown 
up into the real land-owner, and the cultivators, 
instead of becoming the peasants of Switzer- 
land, have degenerated into the ryots of Hin- 
dostan. 

The effects of the Revolution of July on the 
Religion of France, is precisely the same as 
on its political situation. It has drawn aside 
the thin veil which concealed the effects of 
the irreligious spirit of the first convulsion, 
and displayed in its native deformity the con 



144 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



sequence of unmooring the human mind from 
the secure haven of faith and virtue. 

That the first Revolution was essentially 
irreligious in its spirit, that it destroyed not 
only the teachers and the property, but the 
very name of Christianity, is universally 
known. But in this, as in every other respect, 
the Restoration drew a veil over its ultimate 
and final consequences. The exiled family 
returned to the palaces of their fathers, with a 
profound sense of religion, rendered only the 
more indelible from the disasters which had 
preceded their restoration. By the combined 
effect of their authority and influence, a gloss 
was thrown over the infidel consequences of 
the first Revolution; the priests were reinstated 
in the smiles of court favour; the Tuileries 
again resounded with the strains of devotion ; 
religious observances were tolerably attended 
to; the churches were filled, if not with the 
faithful, at least with the ambitious, and pro- 
motion, dependent in some degree on attention 
to the ceremonial of the Catholic faith, drew 
multitudes to the standard of St. Louis. Marshal 
Soult was to be seen every Sunday parading 
to church, preceded by an enormous breviary ; 
he cared not whether the road to power lay 
by the chapel of the Virgin, or the altar of the 
Goddess of reason. Sunday, especially in the 
last ten years, was well observed in the great 
towns. Travellers perceived no material dif- 
ference between the appearance of London 
and Paris during divine service. Literature, 
encouraged by this transient glance of sun- 
shine, resumed its place by the side of de- 
votion ; the mighty genius of Chateaubriand 
lent its aid to the Holy Alliance, and poured 
over the principles of natural and revealed 
religion a flood of resplendent light; Michaux 
traced the history of the Crusaders, and the 
efforts for the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre, 
with an antiquary's knowledge and a poet's 
fire; Barante revived in the Annals of Bur- 
gundian princes, the old and venerable feel- 
ings of feudal devotion; while Guizot, as yet 
untouched by the seductions of power, traced 
with admirable ability, to admiring multitudes 
in the French metropolis, the historical bless- 
ings of religious institutions. Almost all ob- 
servers, misled by these appearances, flattered 
themselves, that the period of the reaction of 
the human mind against the principles of ir- 
religion had arrived; that the reign of infideli- 
ty was drawing to its close; and that the 
French Revolution, nursed amidst the mazes 
of sophistry and skepticism, was destined to 
find refuge at last in the eternal truths of 
religion. 

But this sudden extinction of evil and resur- 
rection of good is not the order of nature. 
Infidelity, nursed for half a century, is not ex- 
tinguished in a few years. The robbery of 
one-third of the national property from the 
service of the church is not the way to secure 
the fruits of virtue : a hiatus of ten years in 
the religious education of the people, snapped 
asunder a chain which had descended un- 
broken from the apostolic ages. These deplo- 
rable events were secretly but securely work- 
ing out their natural consequences, through all 
the period of the Restoration. The general 



and profound hatred in towns at the very sight 
even of an ecclesiastic, was a certain indica- 
tion of the great extent to which the deadly 
weeds of infidelity had spread. The Revolu- 
tion of July at once tore aside the veil, and 
exposed to view the extraordinary spectacle 
of a nation in which the classes who concen- 
trate almost the whole political influence of 
the state, are almost wholly of an irreligious 
character. This is to be ascribed chiefly to 
the long chasm in religious instruction which 
took place from 1791 to 1800, and the entire 
assumption of political power under Napo- 
leon, by a class who were entire strangers to 
any kind of devotion. Such a chasm cannot 
readily be supplied ; ages must elapse before 
its effects are obliterated. " Natura tamen," 
says Tacitus, "infirmitatis humance tardiora 
sunt remedia quam mala, et ut corpora lente 
augescunt cito extinguuntur, sic ingenia studia- 
que oppresseris facilius quam revocaveris." 

But to whatever cause it is owing, nothing 
can be more certain, than that infidelity again 
reigns the lord of the ascendant in Paris. It 
is impossible to be a week in the metropolis 
without being sensible of this. It is computed 
that from sixty to eighty thousand individuals, 
chiefly old women, or persons of the poorest 
classes, believe in the Christian religion. The 
remainder, amounting to about eight hundred 
thousand, make no pretension to such a faith. 
They do not deny it, or say or think any thing 
about it ; they pass it by as a doubtful relic of 
the olden time, now entirely gone by.* It is 
impossible by any external appearances to 
distinguish Sunday from Saturday, excepting 
that every species of amusement and dissipation 
goes on with more spirit on that day that any 
other. We are no advocates for the over-rigid 
or Judaical observance of the day of rest. 
Perhaps some Protestant nations have gone 
too far in converting the Christian Sunday 
into the Jewish Sabbath, and preventing on it 
those innocent recreations which might divert 
the giddy multitude from hidden debauchery. 
But without standing up for any rigid or puri- 
tanical ideas, it may safely be affirmed that the 
total neglect of Sunday by nine-tenths of the 
people, indicates a fixed disregard of religion 
in any state professing a belief in Christianity. 
In Paris the shops are all open, the carts all 
going, the workmen all employed on the early 
part of Sunday ; and although a part of them 
are closed after two o'clock in the afternoon, it 
is not with the slightest intention of joining in 
any, even the smallest religious duty, that this 
is done. It is "pour s'amuser," to forget the 
fatigues of the week in the excitement with 
which it terminates, that the change takes 
place. At two o'clock, all who can disengage 
themselves from their daily toil, rush away in 
crowds to drink of the intoxicating cup of 
pleasure. Then the omnibusses roll with 
ceaseless din in every direction out of the 
crowded capital, carrying the delighted citi- 
zens to St. Cloud, St. Germains, or Versailles, 
the Ginguettes of Belleville, or the gardens of 
Vincennes ; then the Boulevards teem with 
volatile and happy crowds, delighted by the 



* In this, as in many other respects, a most gratifying 
change has, since 1833, begun in France. 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



145 



enjoyment of seeing and beina: seen ; then the 
gardens of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg, 
the Jardin des Plantes, and the Champs Ely- 
sees, are enlivened with the young, the gay, and 
the handsome, of both sexes, both rich and 
poor; then the splendid drive to the triumphal 
arch of Neuille, is filled with the comparative- 
ly i'ew equipages which the two Revolutions 
have left to the impoverished hotels of the 
capital. While these scenes of gayety and 
amusement are going on, the priests in each 
of the principal churches are devoutly per- 
forming mass before a few hundred old wo- 
men, tottering ecclesiastics, or young children. 
and ten or fifteen Protestant churches are as- 
sembling as many thousands to the duties of 
the reformed faith. Such is a Parisian Sun- 
day; and such the respect for a divine ordi- 
nance, which remains in what they ambi- 
tiously call the metropolis of European civili- 
zation. 

As evening draws on, the total disregard of 
religious observance is, if possible, still more 
conspicuous. Never is the opera filled with 
such enthusiastic crowds as on Sunday even- 
ing; — never are the theatres of the Port St. 
Martin, the Boulevards, the Opera Comique, 
the Vaudeville and the Variet.es, so full as on 
that occasion ; — never are the balls beyond the 
barriers so crowded ; — never is Tivoli so en- 
livening, or the open air concerts in the 
•Champs Elysees thronged by so many thou- 
sands. On Sunday evening in Paris there 
seems to be but one wish, one feeling, one 
desire, — and that is, to amuse themselves ; and 
by incessantly labouring at that one object, 
they certainly succeed in it to an extent that 
■could hardly be credited in colder and more 
austere latitudes. 

The condition of the clergy over France is, 
generally speaking, depressed and indigent in 
the extreme. The Constituent Assembly, who 
decreed the annexation of the whole property 
of the church to the state, and declared " that 
they intrusted the due maintenance of reli- 
gion and the succour of the poor to the honour 
of the great nation," redeemed their pledge, by 
giving most of the incumbents of the rural 
parishes from 48/. to 60/. a year. Bishops 
have 6000 francs, or 240/., yearly. The arch- 
bishop of Paris alone has 600/. In some of 
the town parishes, the incumbents, from sub- 
sequent endowments or adventitious sources, 
have from 200/. to 300/. per annum ; but, ge- 
nerally speaking, their income, in the richest 
parishes, varies from 80/. a year to 120/.; in 
the poorest, it is only from 40/. to 50/. It may 
safely be affirmed, that the clergy of France, 
taken as a body, are poorer than the school- 
masters of England and Scotland. 

The effect of this is seen in the most striking 
manner in the appearance of the rural land- 
scape of France. You generally, in the vil- 
lages, see a parish church, the bequest to the 
nation of the pious care of their forefathers ; 
but great numbers of these are in a ruinous 
or tottering condition. There is an evident 
want of any funds to keep them up. The 
most trifling repairs of a church, as every 
thing else in France, must be executed by the 
government ; and the ministers of Louis 
19 



Philippe seem to think that this is one of the 
articles upon which economy can best be 
practised. But a parsonage-house, or any 
sort of separate residence for the cure, is 
never to be seen. He is, in general, boarded 
in the houses of some farmer or small pro- 
prietor; and in habits, society, education, 
manners, and rank of life, is in no respect 
above the peasantry by whom he is sur- 
rounded. 

It is not to be imagined from this, however, 
that the country clergy are either ignorant or 
inattentive to their sacred duties ; on the con- 
trary, they are most assiduous in discharging 
them, and are, in general, justly endeared to 
their flocks, not only by an irreproachable life, 
but the most constant and winning attentions. 

It would be unjust to expect in them the 
high education, gentlemanlike manners, or 
enlightened views of the English clergy; or 
the more discursive but useful information 
which is to be met with in the manses of the 
Presbyterian ministers in Scotland. We must 
not expect to see either Hebers, or Copple- 
stoncs, or Bucklands, or Blairs, or Robertsons, 
or Chalmerses, in the modern church of France. 
The race of Bossuet and Fenelon, of Massil- 
lon and Bourdaloue, of Flechier and Saurin. 
of Pascal and Malebranche, is extinct. The 
church is cast down into an inferior class in 
society. No one would make his son an ec- 
clesiastic, who could obtain for him a situation 
in a grocer's shop. But, in the present state 
of the country, it is perhaps as well that this 
is the case. The reformation of the corrupted 
higher orders in the towns, is out of the ques- 
tion ; and if a priesthood, drawn from their 
ranks, were to be established, it would speedily 
draw to itself such a load of infidel obloquy, 
as would lead to its destruction. But the poor 
and humble parish priests are overlooked and 
despised by the arrogant liberals in possession 
of office and power; and, like their predeces- 
sors in the apostolic ages, they are, unob- 
served, laying the foundation of a spirit 
destined, in a future age, to overturn the insti- 
tutions of their haughty oppressors, and effect 
that real regeneration of society, which can 
be found only in the reformation of the morals 
and principles of its members.* 

The abject poverty of the rural clergy in 
most parts of the rural districts of France, 
is a most painful objectof contemplation to an 
English traveller. There is scarce any pro- 
vision for them in sickness or old age ; and 
when they are compelled, by either of these 
causes, to divide their scanty income with a 
more robust assistant, their condition becomes 
truly pitiable. In most cathedral churches is 
to be seen a box, with the inscription " Tronc 
pour les malheureux pretres ;" a few sous are 
thankfully received by the religious teachers 
of the great nation. One of these boxes is to 
be seen on the pillars of Notre Dame; another 
under the gorgeous aisle of Rouen ; a third in 
the graceful choir of Amiens ; a fourth dis- 
graces the generation who pass under the 
splendid portals of Rheims, and a fifth, that 

* The change here predicted has since taken place to 
a great extent in France. 

N 



146 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



■which points with deserved pride to the match- 
less Tower of Chartres. 

A superficial observer who should judge of 
the religious state of France from the appear- 
ance of its great towns, however, would be far 
wide of the truth. It is a total mistake to sup- 
pose that devotion is extinct, or in the process 
of extinction among its country inhabitants. It 
is in the great towns that infidelity reigns tri- 
umphant; — it is among the young, the active, 
and the profligate citizens of despotic Paris, 
that religion is the subject of ridicule. It is true 
this class are now in the exclusive possession 
of political power; it is true several hundred 
thousand of them are dispersed over the mighty 
net which envelopes France in the meshes of 
the capital ; it is true that they direct literature, 
and influence thought, and stamp its character 
upon the nation, in the estimation of foreign 
states : still they are not in possession of the 
mighty lever which directs the feelings of the 
rural inhabitants. As long as forty-eight thou- 
sand parish priests, overlooked from their po- 
verty, despised from their obscurity, contempt- 
ible to this world from their limited information, 
are incessantly and assiduously employed in 
diffusing religious belief through the peasantry, 
the extirpation of Christianity in France is im- 
possible. Its foundations are spreading the 
deeper — its influences becoming more para- 
mount in the uncorrupted provinces, from the 
total neglect into which it has fallen with the 
influential classes in the capital. It is impos- 
sible to enter any parish church in any part 
of the provinces, without being sensible that a 
large and increasingportion of the peasantry are 
strongly and profoundly impressed with reli- 
gious feelings. In this state of things, the eye 
of philanthropy, without pretending to the gift 
of prophecy, can perhaps discern the elements 
brewing which are destined, in some future age, 
to produce another Revolution, — an insur- 
rection of the provinces against the capital, 
— a real regeneration of society, by the infusion 
of rural simplicity and virtue into urban cor- 
ruption and degeneracy, — a termination of the 
convulsion, which commenced by casting down 
religion, in the triumph of the faith which ga- 
thers strength from misfortune. But whether 
this is to be the final result, or whether, as is 
perhaps more probable, the utter prostration 
of the internal liberties of the nation, through 
the consequences of the Revolution, is to lead 
to the loss of its external independence, and 
the regeneration of southern weakness by a 
race of northern conquerors ; one thing is cer- 
tain, and may be confidently prophesied, that 
France will never know what real freedom is, 
till her institutions are founded on the basis of 
religion, and that with the triumph of the faith 
which her Liberals abhor, and have cast down, 
is indissolubly wound up the accomplishment 
of the objects which they profess to have at 
heart. 

The Morals of France are in the state which 
might be expected in a country which has bro- 
ken asunder all the bonds of society, and de- 
spises all the precepts of religion. Pleasure 
and excitement are the general subjects of 
idolatry — money, as the key to them, the uni- 
versal object. This desire for wealth is per- 



haps more strongly felt in Paris, and forms 
the great passion of life more completely, than 
in any other capital in Europe, because there 
are more objects of desire presented to the en- 
tranced senses which cannot be gained in any 
other way ; and of the prevalence of this desire 
the great extent of its gaming-houses affords 
ample proof. But money is not the object of 
desire to the Parisian, as to the Dutchman or 
Englishman, from any abstract passion for ac- 
cumulation, or any wish to transmit, by a life 
of economy, an ample patrimony to his chil- 
dren. It is for the sake of present and immedi- 
ate gratification ; that he may go more fre- 
quently to the opera, or indulge more liberally 
in the pleasures of the Ginguette ; that his wife 
and daughters may be more gaily dressed on 
Sundays, and their Tivoli parties be more bril- 
liant, that money is so passionately coveted. 
The efforts made by all classes to gain a live- 
lihood, and the prodigious obstacles which 
competition throws in their way, are perhaps 
greater in Paris than in any other metropolis 
of Europe. " Querrenda est pecunia prirnum, 
virtus post nummos," is the general maxim of 
life. But still there is little accumulation of 
capital, comparatively speaking, within its 
walls. As fast as money is made, it is spent; 
either in the multifarious objects of desire which 
are everywhere presented to the sight, or in 
the purchase of rentes, or government annui- 
ties, which die with the holders. The propor- 
tion of annuitants in France is incomparably 
greater than in England ; and the destitution 
of families from the loss of their head, exists 
to a painful and unheard of extent. 

Pleasure and excitement are the universal 
objects ; the maxims of Epicurus the general 
observance. To enjoy the passing hour — to 
snatch from existence all the roses which it 
will afford, and disquiet themselves as little as 
possible about its thorns, is the grand principle 
of life. The state of Paris in this respect has 
been well described by a late enlightened and 
eloquent author — 

" Paris is no longer a city which belongs to 
any one nation or people: it is in many re- 
spects the metropolis of the world ; the ren- 
dezvous of all the rich, all the voluptuous on 
the face of the earth. For them its artists, as- 
sembled from every quarter of Europe, imagine 
or invent every day fresh objects of excitement 
or desire ; for them they build theatres, and 
multiply indefinitely all the ephemeral novel- 
ties calculated to rouse the senses and stimu- 
late expense. There every thing may be pur- 
chased, and that too under the most alluring 
form. Gold is the only divinity which is wor- 
shipped in that kingdom of pleasure, and it is 
indifferent from what hand it flows. It is in 
that centre of enjoyment that all the business 
of France is done — that all its wealth is 
expended, and the fruit of its toil from one 
end of the kingdom to the other brought to the 
great central mart of pleasure. The proprie- 
tor wrings the last farthing out of his soil — the 
merchant, the notary, the advocate, flock there 
from all quarters to sell their capital, their re- 
venue, their virtue, or their talents, for plea- 
sure of every description, which a thousand 
artists nourtray in the most seducing colours 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



147 



to a nation famishing for enjoyment. And it 
is from that corrupted centre that we are told 
the regeneration of the state, the progress of 
independence and liberty, is to How."* 

As pleasure and excitement are thus the 
universal objects, it may readily be conceived 
what facilities are afforded in the French me- 
tropolis for their gratification. The gaming- 
houses, accordingly, are innumerable; and 
abOve a third of the children born within the 
barriers are bastards.f But those who look 
for excitation of that description, will not find 
in Paris any thing approaching to the open 
and undisguised profligacy of London. There 
is nothing in its public places approaching to 
the saloons of Drury Lane, or the upper circles 
of Covent Garden ; the Strand and Regent 
Street at night are infested in a way unknown 
even in the Boulevards Italiens, or the Rue de 
Richelieu. The two Revolutions have organize:! 
licentiousness. Having become the great object 
of life, and, as it were, the staple commodity 
of the capital, it has fallen under the direction 
of the police. Eienseance and decorum are 
there the order of the day. The sirens of 
pleasure are confined to a few minor theatres, 
and particular quarters of the town ; they 
abound in every street, almost in every house; 
but they can openly ply their vocation in ap- 
pointed districts only. Even the Palais Royal. 
the cradle of both Revolutions, has been purged 
of the female anarchists who were their first 
supporters. This is certainly a very great 
improvement, well worthy of imitation on the 
British side of the Channel. Youth and 
timidity are not openly assailed as they are in 
English great towns, and, though those who 
seek for dissipation will meet with it in 
abundance, it is not, willing or unwilling, 
thrust down their throats. It is possible, in 
the Quartier de f Universite and remoter parts 
of Paris, for young men to pursue their stu- 
dies, infinitely more clear of temptation than 
either at the London University or King's 
College. 

But while these advantages must be con- 
ceded to the organization and arrangements of 
the French police on the one hand, it is not 
the less certain, on the other, that all these fair 
appearances are merely skin-deep, and that 
under this thin disguise is half concealed a 
mass of licentiousness probably unprecedented 
in any modern state. Certainly, never since 
the days of the Roman emperors, was pleasure 
so unceasingly pursued by both sexes, as it is 
now at Paris ; or such efforts made to heighten 
natural desire by forced excitement, or talent 
and art so openly called in to lend their aid to 
the cause of licentiousness. Profligate books 
and prints exist everywhere; but in other 
capitals, they must be sought after to be 
found, and where they are, their character and 
appearance show that they are meant for the 
brutal classes, or the higher orders in their 
moments of brutality, only. But in Paris the 
case is the reverse. The treasures of know- 
ledge, the elegance of art, the fascination of 
genius, are daily and hourly employed in the 
cause of corruption; and of them may truly 

* General Donnadieu, 270—271. 

t Dupin'g Force Commerciale, p. 40. 



be said, what Mr. Burke falsely affirmed of the 
old French manners, that "vice has lost half 
its deformity by having lost all its grossness." 
The delicacy and beauty of these productions, 
as well as their amazing number, prove that 
they find a ready sale with the higher as well 
as the lower orders. They have discovered 
the truth of the old maxim, "Ars est celare 
artem." Voluptuousness is more surely at- 
tained by being half disguised ; and corruption 
spreads the more securely, from having cast 
aside every thing calculated to disgust its un- 
hardened votaries. The arts of lithography 
and printing go hand in hand in this refined 
and elegant system of demoralization ; the 
effusions of genius, the beauty of design, the 
richness of colouring, are employed together 
to throw an entrancing light over the scenes 
of profligacy, and the ordinary seductions of a 
great capital, heightened by all that taste or 
art can suggest to stimulate the passions — 
emblematic of the mixed good and evil which 
has resulted from these great inventions, and 
the prodigious force they have given to the 
solvents of vice in one age, as well as the 
hardening principles of virtue in another. 

It is observed by Montesquieu, that honour, 
as the national principle, is more durable in 
its nature than either virtue or religion ; and 
the present state of Paris contrasted with the 
military character of the French affords a 
strong confirmation of the observation. The 
incessant pursuit of pleasure by both sexes, 
has in every age been the grand solvent which 
has melted away the principle of military vir- 
tue ; and the reason is obvious, because those 
whose chief object is selfish gratification can- 
not endure the fatigues and the privations 
attendant on military exploits. There cannot 
be a doubt that this destroying principle is in 
full operation in the French capital ; but 
though it has completely eaten through the 
safeguards of religion and virtue, it has hither- 
to left undecayed the passion for military dis- 
tinction. The extraordinary strength which 
this principle has acquired in modern Europe 
in general, and France in particular, from the 
feudal institutions, and the great development 
which it received from the wars of the Revolu- 
tion and the triumphs of Napoleon, have, to all 
appearance, withstood the enervating influence 
of a corrupting ingredient which proved fatal 
to the courage of Greece and Rome ; but it is 
not the less certain that it will ultimately sink 
before its influence. It is by not elevating our 
minds to the slow progress of all such great 
changes, that we are at all misled on any oc- 
casion as to their progress, or the effect on 
public fortune of the principles of decay, which 
spring from the progress of private corruption. 
The alteration, like the decline, of the day in 
autumn, is imperceptible from day to day; but 
it becomes quite apparent if we contrast one 
period or age of the world with another. Com- 
pare the age of Regulus or Scipio, with that of 
Constantine or Honorius ; or that of the Lom- 
bard League with the present pusillanimity of 
the Italian people ; and the prostration of na- 
tional strength by the growth of private selfish- 
ness is obvious to the most careless observer. 
The French Revolution is not destined to form 



J48 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



an exception to the general law; its fortunes 
will be ultimately destroyed by the effects of 
the poisoned source from which they sprung; 
the conquests of its authors will be lost by 
their inability to conquer themselves. Both 
revolutions have begun in the Palais Royal, 
the very focus of corruption from every part 
of France ; and through every stage of their 
progress, both have given unequivocal proofs 
of their impure origin. Let the friends of reli- 
gion and virtue be of good cheer ; no institu- 
tions founded on such a basis were ever yet 
durable; the French Revolution began in the 
haunts of profligacy, and they have spread in 
it the seeds of mortality which will bring it to 
the grave. 

Next to sexual profligacy, gaming is par 
excellence the grand vice of Paris ; and it, like 
every other principle of evil, has made rapid 
and fearful progress since the Three Days. No 
attempts whatever are made to restrain it ; on 
the contrary, it is taken under the safeguard 
of the police, and a tax levied on its profits, as 
on those of prostitution, which constitutes a 
considerable part of the municipal revenue. 
The prodigious number of suicides which 
occur in Paris, amounting on an average to 
above one a night, frequently to a great deal 
more, chiefly spring from the despair produced 
by the inordinate passion for this vice. Unlike 
what generally occurs in England, it exists 
equally among the poorest as the richest 
classes ; their hells are open for the sous of 
the labourer or the francs of the artisan, as 
well as the Napoleon of the officer or the 
rouleaux of the banker. They are to be met 
with in every street ; they spread their devas- 
tating influence through every workshop and 
manufactory in Paris. This perilous vice, like 
that of sexual profligacy, is the natural result 
of a successful revolution ; of the demolition 
of all restraint on the passions, which has 
arisen from silencing the voice of religion, 
and the bounty offered to instant excitement, 
by the uncertainty in regard to the future, 
which the destruction of all the institutions of 
society inevitably produces.* 

In one particular, however, the French capi- 
tal offers a pleasing contrast to every con- 
siderable town in the British isles. Drunken- 
ness, though considerably more prevalent than 
formerly, does not exist in France to an extent 
at al! comparable to what it does in England; 
and hence the manners of the lower orders, 
notwithstanding all the anarchy of the Revo- 
lution, are not half so coarse and brutal as in 
our great manufacturing towns. In truth, the 
extraordinary progress of this frightful vice in 
Great Britain, since the reduction of the duty 
on spirits and the abolition of the beer tax,f 
is one of the most woful circumstances in our 
social condition, and which, if not rapidly 
checked by a proper set of fiscal regulations, 
promises soon to plunge our labouring classes 

* A great change in this respect has since been made 
liy the authority and interposition of government, after 
the evil here described had become intolerable. 

i Nothing ever gave us more pleasure than to observe 
from a late Parliamentary return, that, since the slight 
addition to the duty on spirits in 1830, the manufacture 
of the fiery poison has declined in Scotland, 1,300,000 
gallons yearly. 



into a state of depravity unparalleled in any 
Christian state. Drunkenness, if seen in public 
at Paris, is at once punished by the police; 
and the prodigious number of civil and mili- 
tary employes who are to be met with in every 
street at night, renders it impossible for the 
inebriated to indulge in those disgraceful 
brawls which then disgrace every English 
city. The abstinence from this vice depends 
chiefly on constitutional causes, the warmth 
of the climate, which renders the excitement 
of intoxication not so desirable as in northern 
latitudes; but much is to be ascribed also to 
the happy custom of levying a heavy duty 
(a franc a bottle) on wine imported into the 
metropolis, — a burden which banishes intoxi- 
cation in a great degree to the outside of the 
barriers, and confines it to the days when a 
walk to those remote stations can be under- 
taken by the working classes. Would that a 
similar burden existed on all spirits imported 
into the towns in Great Britain ! 

The state of Literature, especially those 
lighter branches of it which exhibit the faith- 
ful picture of the public feeling and ideas, is 
equally instructive since the Three Days. It is 
difficult to convey to an English reader, un- 
acquainted with the modern French novels, 
any adequate idea of the extraordinary mix- 
ture which they exhibit; and they present 
perhaps the most convincing proof 1 which the 
history of fiction affords, of the indispensable 
necessity of fixed principles in religion and 
virtue to restrain the otherwise inordinate flight 
of the human imagination. 

It was long the fashion with the apologists 
of the Revolution to assert that public morals 
had improved during its progress ; that the 
license and profligacy of the days of Louis 
XV. and the Regent Orleans would no longer 
be tolerated; and that with the commence- 
ment of higher duties and the growth of severer 
principles, the licentiousness which had so 
long disgraced the French literature had for 
ever disappeared. The present state of French 
novels may show, whether a successful Revo- 
lution, and the annihilation of all the fetters 
of religion, is the way to regenerate such a 
corrupted mass. Having lost nothing of former 
profligacy, having abated nothing of former 
infidelity, they have been tinged by the fierce 
passions and woful catastrophes which arose 
during the first Revolution. Romance has now 
become blended with sensuality; German ex- 
travagance with French licentiousness; the 
demons of the air with the corruptions of the 
world. The modern French novels are not 
one whit less profligate than those of Louis 
XV., but they are infinitely more extravagant, 
wild, and revolting. To persons whose minds 
have as yet been only partially shaken by 
the terrible catastrophes of a revolution, it is 
hardly conceivable how such extravagant fic- 
tions should ever have entered the human 
imagination. They are poured forth, however, 
with unbounded profusion by their modern 
novelists, and passionately read by a genera- 
tion whose avidity for strong emotions and 
vivid excitement, whether from terror, as- 
tonishment, despair, or licentiousness, seems 
to know no bounds. 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



149 



The limits of an Essay, such as this, embrac- 
ing such a variety of objects, though few more 
important, forbid us from attempting what we 
intended, and possibly may hereafter resume 
— an analysis of some of these extravagant 
and detestable, though often able and power- 
ful publications. Suffice it to say, that the 
basis of almost the whole of them is adultery, 
or other guilty and extravagant sensual pas- 
sion ; and they generally terminate in suieidi . 
or some such horrid catastrophe. On details 
of this description they dwell with minute and 
often coarse avidity; but it is by no means 
with such passions that they are solely filled; 
they have also borrowed largely from German 
fiction and extravagance, from Catholic legends 
and superstition, from feudal manners and 
oppression, from chivalrous adventure and 
exploits. They form what may be styled the 
Romantic Licentious School of Fiction. Murders 
and robberies, rapes and conflagrations, the 
guillotine and the scaffold, demons and guar- 
dian angels, confessors and confidants, Satan 
and St. Michael, ghosts, wizards, incest, sen- 
suality, parricides, suicides, and ever)' kind 
of extravagance, are thrown together in wild 
confusion; but the general result is ruinous 
to every species of regular or virtuous con- 
duct, and may be considered as affording a 
specimen of the frame of mind in which the 
victims who are shortly after stretched out on 
the Morgue, rush from the gambling-houses 
in the Palais Royal, to drown the chaos of 
contending passions in the waters of the Seine.* 

The dramatic pieces which have sprung up 
since the Revolution of 1830, afford the same 
extraordinary picture of the confusion of ideas, 
feelings, and emotions, in which the French 
youth are involved since they pushed out to a 
stormy sea without either compass or rudder. 
They almost all turn upon adultery, incest, or 
some such elegant and chastened depravity; 
but of the chaos of extravagance, fiction, 
allegory, vice, and horror which they present, 
it is impossible to convey any idea. Some of 
them, particularly " La Reine d'Espagne," have 
been hissed from the stage, as too bad even 
for a Parisian audience. From others, as "La 
Tentation," the most obnoxious scenes, in one 
of which a rape was represented almost be- 
fore the eyes of the spectators, have been 
dropped out. But still they are in general so 
extravagant, indelicate, and licentious, that it 
is impossible to speak of them in terms of 
sufficient reprobation ; and the most respecta- 
ble writers of France, of the Liberal school, 
regard them with a degree of horror even sur- 
passing that which they excite in the mind of 
an English spectator. "If its literature," says 
Salvandy, " is to be regarded as the expression 
of national character, not a hope remains for 
France. It is stained with every species of 
corruption; its fundamental principle is to 
attack every sentiment and interest of which 



* So monstrous: have the extravagances become, that 
they have excited Hi" attention even of the steadiest 
apologists of the French Revolution ; and the Edinburgh 
Review, iii a recent number, lias borne the candid 
testimony of an unwilling witness to the demoralizing 
effects of tbeir favourite political principles. See the 
Late French Novelists, in No. 110 of the Edinburgh 
Review. 



the social order is composed. You would sup- 
pose that it was resolutely bent on restoring 
to France all the vices which it had imbibed 
at the close of the last century. A sort of 
dogmatic cynicism has invaded all its depart- 
ments. If, on the strength of a name of 
celebrity, or the daily eulogies of the press, 
you venture to a theatre, you see represented 
scenes where the dignity of the one sex is as 
much outraged as the modesty of the other. 
Everywhere the same sort of spectacles await 
you. There is a class which they keep as yet 
behind the curtain, contenting themselves with 
announcing atrocities which the public are 
not yet prepared to bear. Romance has already 
given the example of this depraved species of 
composition. The muse now makes use of 
obscenities, as formerly it did of passion. What 
is to follow when tragedy and romance have 
exhausted their brief career, God only knows. 
When they have ceased to illuminate these 
hideous orgies, the lights of literature will be 
extinguished."* 

To give some idea of these extraordinary 
productions which now are represented with 
such prodigious success at the Parisian thea- 
tres, we shall give an abstract of two of the 
most unexceptionable, and, at the same time, 
the most popular pieces which have appeared 
at the opera since the Revolution of July, "La 
Tentation," and " Robert Le Diable." We 
have selected the most delicate which fell 
under our observation ; the pieces represented 
at the minor theatres could not be borne even 
in the decent guise of an English description. 

The first of these, which, in splendour of 
decoration, exceeds any thing yet represented 
even in that most splendid of European theatres, 
turns upon the well-known legend of the Temp- 
tation of St. Anthony; but it is so altered and 
varied to admit their varied and extravagant 
corruptions, that it is hardly possible to re- 
cognise in it the simple tale which has been so 
often immortalized by the pencil of Teniers. 

The piece opens with the saint reposing on 
his pallet at the gate of a solitary chapel, de- 
dicated to the Virgin Mary, and crowds of pil- 
grims of both sexes arrive at the shrine to offer 
up their vows; after which, they join in festive 
amusements, and the danseuscs, arrayed as pea- 
sant girls, dance round the anchorite with sucft 
graceful motions, that he is tempted to indulge 
in a little waltz with the fairest of these daugh- 
ters of Eve. Shortly after, when they have 
retired, a young woman of extraordinary beauty 
comes along to the shrine; dazzled by her 
charms, and encouraged by the opportunity 
which the solitude of the situation afforded, he 
forms the design of seduction, and is endeavour- 
ing to carry his intentions into effect, whea 
she flies to the chapel of the Virgin, and shriek- 
ing, implores her powerful aid to ward off im- 
pending destruction. Instantly the powers tf 
heaven and hell appear. Astaroth and his 
legions of devils, in a thousand frightful forms, 
rise from the earth, and strive to obtain the 
mastery of the fallen saint and endangered vir- 
gin ; while, high in the clouds above, the an- 
gels of heaven appear to throw their shield 

* Salvandy, Seize Mois des Revo.\Uionaires,408. 

x2 



150 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



over supplicant innocence. At length a truce 
is formed between the contending powers ; the 
condition of which is, that the saint is to be 
surrendered to the powers of darkness, to be 
by them subjected to all the temptations which 
can endanger human virtue, and if he falls 
under any one, he is to be abandoned soul and 
body to their dominion ; but if he proves vic- 
torious, he is to be borne aloft to the regions of 
light. The decorations of this scene are of the 
most exquisite description; the angels in the 
clouds are placed in the attitudes pourtrayed 
in Raphael's and Corrcggio's celestial choirs 
in the St. Cecilia at Bologna and the St. Je- 
rome at Parma ; and a mellow light thrown 
over the heavenly group, in so ravishing a 
manner, as to produce an indelible impression 
on the mind of the spectator. 

The next act opens with the convocation of 
the powers of darkness in the infernal regions, 
to consider the measures they should adopt, 
and review the force they could command in 
the great undertaking in which they are en- 
gaged. This leads to a grand review of the 
powers of hell, in which the whole strength 
of the opera and the whole fancy of the artist 
are put forth. The legions of devils, arrayed 
in every possible garb of extravagance, de- 
scend an immense stair, ascending to the top 
of the theatre, on the left hand, and march 
before Astaroth in such numbers, that it is no 
exaggeration to say that three or four hundred 
persons, splendidly dressed, are on the stage 
at the same time. Yet even here French con- 
ceit is curiously manifested, and these legions 
of infernal spirits, in naked or savage attire, 
are preceded by regular pioneers, with their 
shaggy beards, and axes on their shoulders, 
precisely as in the reviews on the Place Ca- 
rousel ! When the review is concluded, the 
infernal conclave, distrustful of their success 
by open force, resolve to carry on the war by 
more insinuating means, and it is determined 
to tempt the saint by means of a young woman 
of their own creation, gifted with every beauty 
and charm which can entrance the senses, all 
which are to be employed to seduce his virtue. 
A cauldron appears, the devils in succession 
throw in some attractive or malignant ni'_rre- 
dient, and shortly the siren steps forth, and 
comes forward to give token of her attractive 
powers, by dancing and waltzing before the 
spectators. At the first representation, she 
arose from the cauldron and danced in a flesh- 
coloured silk dress, tight to the shape, meant 
to represent absolute nudity; but she is now 
arrayed in a slight muslin robe, which throws 
a thin veil of decency over her beautiful 
form. 

In the third act, the saint is subjected to the 
double trial of famine and the siren. The 
scene is transported to the gate of a palace in 
a desolate country, created by the devils for 
the purposes of their temptation ; near the gate 
of which a crucifix appears, rising out of the 
drifting snow. St. Anthony approaches, and 
falls down in supplication at the foot of the 
cross ; his strength is exhausted ; his limbs 
fail ; his wallet does not contain a single crust 
»..f bread. Astaroth appears, followed by the siren 
whom he has created, at the gate of the castle ; 



tutored by him, she descends, approaches the 
saint, and employs all her art to subjugate his 
resolution. She offers to bring him food in 
abundance from the palace, to spread a couch 
of down for his wearied limbs, to clothe in 
rich garments his shivering frame, to abandon 
herself to him, if he will surrender the cruci- 
fix which hangs round his neck, and abjure 
his faith; but the resolution of Saint Anthony 
is immovable. While he lies shivering and 
starving at the foot of the cross, a sumptuous 
feast is prepared before his eyes by the cooks 
in the palace; the savoury flavour comes over 
his fainting senses; he sees it carried up to 
the banquet-hall, where Astaroth and his de- 
vils are feasting and rioting in luxurious plenty, 
and crawls to the gate to implore a crust of 
bread to assuage the intolerable pangs of hun- 
ger; but it is sternly refused, unless he will con- 
sent to part with the cross, in which case he is 
offered the most luxurious fare. He still re- 
mains firm to his faith, and while drenched 
by showers of snow, and starving of hunger, 
hears the wild and frantic revelry which pro- 
ceeds round the well-covered boards, from the 
bi illiantly lighted rooms of the palace. Struck 
with such heroic resolution, the siren is melted. 
She is awakened by the efforts of the Virgin 
to a sense of virtue; she secretly supplies him 
with provisions from the infernal abode ; and 
the daughter of perdition is won over to the 
league of heaven by an act of charity. In- 
stantly the black spot on her breast, the mark 
of reprobation, disappears, and her bosom 
regains its snowy whiteness. Astaroth and 
the infernal legion issue forth, frantic with 
rage at the failure of their design ; they cast 
out their unworthy creation ; the palace, with 
all its treasures, is consigned to the flames, into 
which they plunge, leaving the saint and his 
lovely convert alone in the wilderness of snow. 

Baffled in this design, Astaroth and his league 
next assail the anchorite in a different way. 
The scene changes in the next act to the in- 
terior of a magnificent harem, where the saint 
and the converted maiden are surrounded by 
all the pomp of eastern luxury. The sultanas 
and ladies of the seraglio are seated round the 
walls, and the whole strength of the opera is 
again called forth in the entrancing dances 
which are there employed to captivate the 
senses. Astaroth causes Miranda, the maiden 
of his creation, to dance before the Sultan ; 
captivated by her beauty, he throws her the 
handkerchief; while at the same time Astaroth 
endeavours to persuade the saint to murder the 
Sultan, on the specious pretence of setting free 
the numerous slaves of his passion; Miranda 
seizes the dagger, exclaiming that she alone 
should perpetrate the deed of blood ; the Sul- 
tan is alarmed; the guards surround the her- 
mit and the maid, who throw themselves from 
the windows of the seraglio into the sea, while 
the demons are swallowed up in a gulf of 
fire. 

In the opening of the last act, the anchorite 
is seen reposing on the grass with the maiden 
beside him; the demons surround him during 
his sleep, but cannot pass the holy circle which 
guards the innocent. When he awakens, he 
finds himself enveloped on either side by le- 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



151 



gions of devils in every frightful form, and a 
circle of sirens who dance round him with the 
most voluptuous movements. Meanwhile As- 
taroth has seized Miranda, and " l'a rendue 
victime de sa brutalite et l'a frappe;* the an- 
chorite is on the point of yielding to the se- 
ductions of the sirens who surround him, 
when Miranda, extricated from the arms of 
Astaroth, rushes forward and throws the beads 
and cross she had removed from him over his 
neck. His reason is restored, he regains the 
dominion over his passion. Astaroth plunges 
his dagger in the breast of Miranda in despair 
at the total failure of his prospects. St. Mi- 
chael and the angels descend from heaven; a 
desperate conflict ensues between the powers 
of light and darkness, in the close of which 
Astaroth and his demons are overthrown, and 
the saint and Miranda are borne aloft through 
the clouds into the bosom of the heavenly 
host. 

" Robert le Diable" is founded on a different 
series of adventures, but the same contest of 
the powers of this world with those of hell. 
The first act opens on the shore of the har- 
bour of Palermo, where Norman knights, un- 
der the shade of acacia trees, celebrate their 
mistresses, their wines, their games. Robert 
and his friend Bertram are seated together, 
when a minstrel arrives, leading a beauteous 
maid, his affianced bride. Robert asks him 
for news; he recounts the story of Robert le 
Diable, who was the son of Bertha, a noble 
maid of Normandy, who had yielded to the 
seduction of a demon, in the form of a hand- 
some stranger. Unknowingly he is reciting 
the tale to Robert himself, who, in a transport 
of rage at the narrative, is on the point of 
plunging his dagger into his bosom; when he 
is restrained by his friend Bertram, who pre- 
vails on him to respite the minstrel for an hour. 
Meanwhile he promises the handsome fiancee 
to his chevaliers; but when she is introduced 
to be surrendered to their desires, he discovers 
in the maid, Alice, his beauteous foster-sister, 
the bearer of the testament of his mother, who 
on her deathbed had besought her to convey 
her last, instructions to her beloved son. Ro- 
bert, in return, recounts to Alice his love for 
the fair Princess Isabella of Sicily, whom he 
was on the point of carrying off' from her pa- 
rents, when he was assailed by the knights of 
Sicily, and only rescued by his friend Bertram. 
At this juncture, Bertram approaches; Alice 
involuntarily shudders at his sight, from the 
resemblance which he bears to the paintings 
of ^ ;tan combating St. Michael, but having re- 
covered from her alarm, undertakes to convey 
a letter from Robert to the Princess Isabella. 

The next act opens with the princess in the 
interior of the palace of Palermo, bewailing 
the loss of the faithful Robert, and her unhap- 
py fate, in being compelled to wed the Prince 
of Grenada, contrary to her inclinations. 
Young maidens, the bearers of petitions, are 
introduced, among whom is Alice, who insinu- 
ates into her hand the letter of Robert. She 
consents to see him. He is introduced, and 
clothed by her attendants with a splendid suit 

* This, though slill in the programme of the piece, 
was found to be revolting, and is now omitted. 



of armour to enter the lists against the prince 
in a tournament, where her hand was to be 
the prize of the victor. A herald appears and 
defies Robert, in the name of the prince, who 
eagerly accepts the challenge. Bertram, who 
is Satan in disguise, and had clothed another 
demon with the form of the Prince of Grenada, 
smiles at the success of his projects, to win 
over the soul of Robert to perdition. The 
tournament takes place; Isabella, by her 
father's orders, puts on hi3 armour on the 
Prince of Grenada, but when the trumpets 
sound, she looks in vain for his beloved anta- 
gonist. Robert, restrained by the powers of 
hell, cannot appear. He is for ever disgraced ; 
Bertram beholds his schemes rapidly ap- 
proaching their maturity. 

In the third act, Bertram, pale and agitated, 
emerges from a cavern, the council-hall of 
the infernal powers: He is tormented with 
anxious thoughts, for he has learned the arret 
of Fate that his power over Robert termi- 
nates if he is not devoted to the powers of 
hell before twelve o'clock that night. There 
is not a moment to lose. He casts his eyes 
on Alice, who had come to that solitude to 
meet her betrothed minstrel; the demon is 
seized with passion, and strives to seduce her, 
but is repulsed with horror. She hears, how- 
ever, the choir of hell in the cavern invoking 
the name of Robert, and perceives that Ber- 
tram is Satan in disguise. By the threat of in- 
stant death, he compels her to promise secrecy. 
At this juncture Robert enters, overwhelmed 
with horror at his involuntary failure to ap- 
pear at the tournament: Alice in vain ap- 
proaches to warn him of his danger ; bound 
by her vow of secrecy, she is compelled to 
retire, leaving Robert alone to his satanic con- 
fidant. Bertram then informs him that his 
rival, the Prince of Grenada, had availed him- 
self of the aid of the infernal powers; and 
that he never could overcome him till he had 
taken from the tomb of Saint Rosalie, in a 
neighbouring ruin, agreen branch, the charmed 
wand which would render the lover of Isabella 
all-powerful. Misled by the perfidious advice, 
Robert enters the cavern which he is told leads 
to the tomb, and immediately a scene of match- 
less beauty succeeds. 

The theatre represents a ruined monastery, 
through the lofty desolate arches of which the 
moon throws an uncertain light. Many old 
tombs are scattered about on the broken pave- 
ment, on the top of which the marble figures 
of ancient worthies are seen. In the midst of 
them is the sepulchre of Saint Rosalie, with a 
branch of cypress in the hand of her marble 
effigy. Bertram arrives: he conjures up the 
shades of all the nuns who had been interred 
in the abbey, condemned "en punition d'une 
vie trop profane," to rise to aid in seducing 
Robert into the accomplishment of his pro- 
mise. Instantly the spirits rise out of their 
narrow beds; the marble figures, which re- 
clined on the monumental slabs, step forth 
from every part of the pavement; a hundred 
nuns appear dressed in their robes of white, 
and slowly moving forward through the gloom, 
surround the bewildered knight. Gradually 
they seem to be reanimated by the breath and 



152 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



the passions of life ; they join in dances, at first 
slow and mystical, which insensibly warm into 
grace and voluptuousness. They exert all 
their attractions to induce Robert to advance 
and seize the fated branch. Seduced by so 
many charms, he approaches the sepulchre, 
but starts back on seeing in the marble image 
of the saint a resemblance to his mother; the 
nuns, in encircling bands, renew their efforts 
to entrance his senses ; he yields at length, 
and seizes the branch. Instantly the spell is 
broken; the spectres sink into their graves; 
the figures, late so beauteous, and animated, 
freeze again into lifeless marble, and the 
knight remains alone with the branch, while 
the sacred walls resound with the wild yells of 
the demons at the completion of their victory. 

In the fourth act, Isabella, surrounded by 
her maidens, is represented at her toilet dis- 
tributing her marriage gifts to six young 
women who are to be married at the' .same 
time that .she espouses the Prince of Grenada. 
Robert appears with the green branch; its 
magical powers overwhelm all her attendants 
with lethargic slumbers; the knight approaches 
and makes himself known to the princess ; in 
the midst of her transports, she learns by what 
means lie had obtained the green bough, and 
conjures him to cast away the infernal wand; 
overcome by love and remorse, he breaks the 
branch ; the attendants instantly awaken ; as- 
tonished at the appearance of their lady in the 
arms of a stranger knight, they call in the 
men-at-arms; Robert is seized, and Isabella 
swoons away. 

In the last act, Robert and Bertram appear 
in the vestibule of the cathedral at Palermo ; 
the knight recounts that he had fought the 
Prince of Grenada, and been vanquished by 
him. Bertram assures him that this fatality 
is owing to his fatal imprudence in breaking 
the branch, and that his only hope of success 
is to be found in subscribing an instant com- 
pact with the powers of darkness. At the 
moment when he is about to comply, strains 
of religious music are heard from the choir, 
which thrill through the heart of the wavering 
knight, and recall him to purer sentiments. 
In despair at his failure, Bertram reveals his 
name and character : he is Robert's father, the 
demon who had seduced his mother; and he 
informs him, that, unless he signs the irrevo- 
cable deed before twelve o'clock, he loses him 
forever; if he does, he forthwith becomes the 
husband of Isabella. Robert exclaims, " L'ar- 
ret est prononee, l'Enfer est le plus fort," and 
is just going to sign, when Alice, his foster- 
sister, rushes in, places in his hand the testa- 
ment of his mother, in which she conjures 
him to shun the demon who had ruined her; 
he is again shaken. A desperate struggle en- 
sues between Alice and Bertram, heaven and 
hell, in which Robert is about to yield, when 
twelve strikes; Bertram, with a frightful yell, 
descends into a gulf of fire; the veil of the 
sanctuary is withdrawn, Isabella appears in 
the choir, where she receives the now disen- 
thralled Robert, while an aerial choir celebrates 
1 he triumph of the Most High. 

There is one circumstance very remarkable 
in these theatrical pieces, which have had so 



prodigious a run at the Opera, that each of 
them has been represented above a hundred 
times. Though they originate in the most li- 
centious capital, and are exhibited to the most 
corrupted audience in Europe, yet they both 
terminate in the triumph of virtue over vice, — 
of resolution over temptation, — of the graces 
of heaven over the powers of hell. This, in 
such circumstances, is very remarkable. The 
excitements to the senses in both are in- 
numerable; the situations and incidents such 
as never could have been figured but in a li- 
centious capital; but still the final result is 
the triumph of virtue, and the impression 
mad 1 upon the spectator on the whole de- 
cidedly favourable to its cause. Hypocrisy, 
says Rochefoucault, is the homage which vice 
pays to virtue : it would appear that the senti- 
ments of devotion, and the admiration of in- 
tegrity, are so strongly implanted in the hu- 
man mind, that many ages of corruption must 
elapse before they can be wholly extirpated. 
The French have still so much of both linger- 
ing in their imaginations and their associations 
at least, if not in their conduct, that the open 
disregard of them cannot be as yet tolerated in 
the higher theatres. Centuries of degradation, 
however, similar to that in which, from the re- 
sult of the Revolution, they are now placed, 
will work out this melancholy change, even 
in the country of Fenelon and Bossuet. The 
modern Italian drama frequently represents 
the hero of the piece suffering under the 
agonies of fear; and poltroonery is tolerated 
on the stage by the descendants of the Romans 
and Samnites. 

Another circumstance which is well worthy 
of observation in the romantic licentious lite- 
rature and drama of France, is the frequent use 
which is made of the imagery, the language, 
and the characters of the Roman Catholic re- 
ligion. Even the Romish Calendar, and the 
legends of the saints, are diligently ransacked 
to furnish stories and situations calculated to 
satisfy the avidity of the Parisian public for 
strong emotions. It would appear that the 
Parisians are now placed at that distance from 
religious belief, when they can derive pleasure 
from the lingering recollections which it 
awakens, without being shocked by the pro- 
fanity to which it is exposed. They look upon 
religious impressions and the Catholic tradi- 
tions, as the English regard the fairy tales 
which amused their childhood, and derive a 
transient stimulus from their being brought 
back to their recollection, as we do from see- 
ing Bluebeard or Cinderella on the stage. Re- 
ligion is as frequently the engine for moving 
the imagination now as classical allusions 
were in the last age. The French are in that 
stage of corruption, when they class religious 
imagery, and the early traditions of Scripture, 
with the Gothic superstition of the middle ages, 
— with drawbridges, knights, giants, and chi- 
valry, — and are delighted with their represen- 
tation, as we are with the feudal pictures and 
ancient imagery of Sir Walter Scott. The 
frequent introduction of religious characters 
and traditions in the modern works of imagi- 
nation in France, affords decisive evidence 
that they have passed from the region of be- 



FRANCE IN 1833. 



153 



lief into that of imagination; from subduing 
the passions, or influencing the conduct, to 
thrilling the imagination, and captivating the 
fancy. A people who entertained a sincere 
and practical regard for religion of any sort, 
never could bear to see its incidents and cha- 
racters blended with hobgoblins and demons, — 
with the spectres of the feudal, or the mytholo- 
gy of the classic ages. 

This extraordinary change in the lighter 
branches of French literature is almost entirely 
the result of the late Revolution. The romantic 
school of fiction, indeed, had been steadily 
growing up under the Restoration ; and ac- 
cordingly, the dramatized tales of Sir Walter 
Scott had banished in all but the Theatre 
Francais, the works of Racine and Corneille 
from the stage. But it was not till the triumph 
of the Barricades had cast down the barriers 
of authority and influence, and let in a flood 
of licentiousness upon all the regions of 
thought, that the present intermixture of ex- 
travagance and sensuality took place. Still 
this grievous and demoralizing effect is not to 
be ascribed solely or chiefly to that event, im- 
portant as it has been in scattering far and 
wide the seeds of evil. It is not by a mere 
praetorian tumult in the capital that a nation 
is demoralized ; Rome had twenty such urban 
and military revolutions as that which over- 
threw Charles X. without experiencing any 
material addition to the deep-rooted sources of 
imperial corruption. It was the first Revolu- 
tion, with its frightful atrocities .and crying 
sins, which produced this fatal effect; the se- 
cond merely drew aside the feeble barrier 
which the government of the Restoration had 
opposed to its devastation. In the present 
monstrous and unprecedented state of French 
literature is to be seen the faithful mirror of 
the state of the public miud produced by that 
convulsion ; of that chaos of thoughts and pas- 
sions and recollections, which has resulted 
from a successful insurrection not only against 
the government, but the institutions and the 
belief of former times ; of the extravagance and 
frenzy of the human mind, when turned adrift, 
without either principle or authority to direct 
it, into.the stormy sea of passion and pleasure. 

The graver and more weighty works which 
were appearing in such numbers under the 
Restoration, have all ceased with the victory 
of the populace. The resplendent genius of 
Chateaubriand no longer throws its lustre over 
the declining virtue of the age: the learning 
and philosophy of Guizot is turned aside from 
the calm speculations of history to the turbu- 
lent sea of politics. Thierry has ceased to 
diffuse over the early ages of feudal times, the 
discriminating light of sagacious inquiry: the 
pen of Parente conveys no longer, in clear 
and vivid colours, the manners of the four- 
teenth to the nineteenth century : Thiers, trans- 
formed into an ambitious politician, strives in 
vain, in his measures as a minister, to coun- 
teract the influence of his eloquent writings, as 
an historian: the fervent spirit of Bcranger is 
stilled ; the poetic glow of Lamai tine is quench- 
ed ; the pictured page of Salvandy is employed 
only in pourtraying the deplorable state of so- 
cial and moral disorganization consequent on 
20 



the triumph of the Barricades. Instead of 
these illustrious men has sprung up a host of 
minor writers, who pander to the depraved 
taste of a corrupted age ; the race of Dumas's, 
and Latouches,andJanins, men who apply great 
talent to discreditable but profitable purposes; 
who reflect, like the cameleon, the colours of 
the objects by which they are surrounded, and 
earn, like the opera-dancer, a transient liveli- 
hood, sometimes considerable wealth, by ex- 
citing the passions or ministering to the plea* 
sures of a depraved and licentious metropolis. 

Thus, on all sides, and in every department 
of government, religion, morals, and literature, 
is the debasing and pernicious influence of the 
Revolution manifesting itself; the thin veil 
which concealed the progress of corruption 
during the Restoration, is torn aside; govern- 
ment is settling down into despotism, religion 
into infidelity, morals into licentiousness, lite- 
rature into depraved extravagance. What is to 
be the final issue of these melancholy changes, 
it is impossible confidently to predict; but 
of this we may be well assured, that it is not 
till the fountains of wickedness are closed by 
the seal of religion, and the stream of thought 
is purified by suffering, that the disastrous 
consequences of two successful convulsions 
can be arrested, or freedom established on a 
secure basis, or public felicity based on a du- 
rable foundation. 

The result of all this is, not only that no 
real freedom exists in France, but that the ele- 
ments of constitutional liberty do not exist. 
Every thing depends on the will of the capital : 
and its determination is so much swayed at 
present, at least by the public press, and armed 
force in the capital, that no reliance on the 
stability of any system of government can be 
placed. The first Revolution concentrated all 
the powers of government in the metropolis ; 
the second vested them in the armed force of 
its garrison and citizens. Henceforth the strife 
of faction is likely to be a mere struggle for 
the possession of the public offices, and the 
immense patronage with which they are ac- 
companied : but no measures for the extension 
of public freedom will, to all appearance, be 
attempted. If the republican party were to 
dethrone Louis Philippe, they would raise the 
most violent outcry about the triumph of free- 
dom, and in the midst of it quietly take pos- 
session of the police-office, 'he telegraph, the 
treasury, and begin to exercise .'he vast powers 
of government for their own behoof in the 
most despotic manner. No other system of 
administration is practicable in France. After 
the state to which it has been reduced by its 
two Revolutions, a constitutional monarchy, 
such as existed in Great Britain prior to the 
revolution of 1832 — that is, a monarchy, in 
which the powers of sovereignty were ready 
shared by the crown, the nobles, and the peo 
pie — could not stand in France for a week 
The populace of Paris and their despotic, lead 
ers, or the crown, with its civil and military 
employers, would swallow up supreme power 
in a moment. 

Every government, in the long run, must be 
founded on one of three bases : either the re- 
presentation and attachment of all the great 



154 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



interests of the state; or the force of a power- 
ful and devoted soldiery; or the influence of 
power derived from the possession of all the 
patronage and appointments in the kingdom. 
Constitutional monarchies, the glory of Eu- 
ropean civilization, are founded on the first; 
Asiatic despotisms on the last. By the de- 
struction of all the intermediate classes be- 
tween the throne and the peasant, the French 
have rendered the construction of a representa- 
tive system and a limited throne impossible : 
they have now to choose only between the fet- 
ters of a military, or the corruption of an ori- 



ental, despotism ; between the government of 
the Praetorian guards, and the servility of the 
Byzantine empire. They are perpetually de- 
claiming about the new era which their Revo- 
lution has opened in human affairs, and the 
interminable career of modern civilization: 
let them fix their eyes on the court of the Great 
Mogul and the ryots of Hindostan, and beware 
lest their changes afford a new confirmation 
of the old adage, That there is nothing new 
under the sun; and the dreams of republican 
enthusiasm terminate at last in the strife of 
eunuchs and the jealousy of courtesans. 



ITALY.* 



The scenery of Switzerland is of a dark and 
gloomy description. In the higher Alps, which 
lie between the canton of Berne and the plains 
of Lombardy, the great elevation of the moun- 
tains, the vicinity of perpetual snow, the tem- 
pests which frequently occur, and the devasta- 
tions of the avalanches, have imprinted a stern 
and often dismal aspect on the scenery. As 
the traveller ascends any of those paths, which 
lead from the canton of Berne over the ridge 
of the central Alps to the Italian bailiwicks, 
he gradually approaches the region of eternal 
desolation. The beech and the oak succes- 
sively give place to the larch and the fir, and 
these in their turn disappear, or exhibit only 
the stunted forms and blasted summils which 
are produced by the rigour and severity of the 
climate. Towards the summit of the pass, 
even these marks of vegetation disappear, and 
huge blocks of granite, interspersed with snow, 
or surrounding black and gloomy lakes, form 
the only features of the scenery. 

To the eye which has been habituated for a 
few days only to these stern and awful objects, 
there is no scene so delightful as that which is 
exhibited by the valleys and the lakes which 
lie on the southern side of the Alps. The 
riches of nature, and the delights of a southern 
climate, are there poured forth with a profusion 
which is hardly to be met with in any other 
part of Europe. The valleys are narrow and 
precipitous, bounded on either side by the most 
stupendous cliffs, and winding in such a man- 
ner as to exhibit, in the most striking point of 
view, the unrivalled glories of the scene. But 
though the vallies are narrower, and the rocks 
are higher on the southern than the northern 
side of the Alps, yet the character of the scene 
is widely different in these two situations. The 
larch and the fir form the prevailing wood in 
the higher valleys to the north of the St. Go- 
thard; but the birch, the chestnut, and the oak, 
clothe the sunny cliffs which look to the Italian 
sun. Every crevice, and every projecting 

* Blackwood's Magazine, Feb. 1818, and Supplement 
to EncyclopaediaBritannica, article Italy.— Written when 
tiavelling in that country in 1816 and 1818. 



point on which vegetation can grow, is cover- 
ed with brushwood; and, instead of the gray 
masses of granite which appear on the north- 
ern side, the cliffs of the southern valleys seem 
to have caught the warm glow and varied tints 
of the Italian sky. Nor is the change less ap- 
parent in the agricultural productions of the 
soil. At the foot of the stupendous cliffs, 
which bound the narrow valleys by which the 
mountains are intersected, the vine, the olive, 
and the maize, ripen under the rays of a ver- 
tical sun, while the sweet chestnut and the 
walnut clothe the sloping banks by which the 
wider parts of the valleys are surrounded. 
While sinking under the heat of a summer 
sun, which acquires amazing powers in these 
narrow clefts, the traveller looks back with 
delight to the snowy peaks from which he had 
so lately descended, whose glaziers are soften- 
ed by the distance at which they are seen, and 
seem to partake in the warm glow by which 
the atmosphere is illuminated. 

There is another feature by which these 
valleys are distinguished, which does not oc- 
cur in the Swiss territories. Switzerland is a 
country of peasants: the traces of feudal 
power have been long obliterated in its free and 
happy vallies. But on the Italian side of the 
Alps, the remnants of baronial power are 
still to be seen. Magnificent castles of vast 
dimensions, and placed on the most prominent 
situations, remind the traveller that he is ap- 
proaching the region of feudal influence ; while 
the crouching look and abject manner of the 
peasantry, tells but too plainly the sway which 
these feudal proprietors have exercised over 
their vassals. But whatever may be the in- 
fluence of aristocratic power upon the habits 
or condition of the people, the remains of 
former magnificence which it has left, add 
amazingly to the beauty and sublimity of the 
scenery. In the Misocco these antiquated re- 
mains are peculiarly numerous and imposing. 
The huge towers and massy walls of these 
Gothic castles, placed on what seem inacces- 
sible cliffs, and frowning over the villages 
which have grown up beneath their feet, give 



ITALY. 



155 



an air of antiquity and solemnity to the scene, 
which nothing else is capable of producing; 
for the works of nature, long as they have 
stood, are still covered with the verdure of 
perpetual youth. It is in the works of man 
alone that the symptoms of age or of decay 
appear. 

The Italian lakes partake, in some measure, 
in the general features which have been men- 
tioned as belonging to the valleys on the south- 
ern side of the Alps ; but they are charac- 
terized also by some circumstances which are 
peculiar to themselves. Their banks are al- 
most everywhere formed of steep mountains, 
which sink at once into the lake without any 
meadows or level ground on the water side. 
These mountains are generally of great height, 
and of the most rugged forms ; but they are 
clothed to the summit with luxuriant woods, 
except in those places where the steepness of 
the precipices precludes the growth of vegeta- 
tion. The continued appearance of front and 
precipice which they exhibit, would lead to the 
belief that the banks of the lake are uninha- 
bited, were it not for the multitude of villages 
with which they are everywhere interspersed. 
These villages are so numerous and extensive, 
that it may be doubted whether the population 
anywhere in Europe is denser than on the 
shores of the Italian lakes. No spectacle in 
nature can be more beautiful than the aspect 
of these clusters of human habitations, all 
built of stone, and white-washed in the neatest 
manner, with a simple spire rising in the cen- 
tre of each, to mark the number and devotion 
of the inhabitants, surrounded by luxuriant 
forests, and rising one above another to the 
highest parts of the mountains. Frequently 
the village is concealed by the intervention 
of some rising ground, or the height of the 
adjoining woods ; but the church is always 
visible, and conveys the liveliest idea of the 
peace and happiness of the inhabitants. These 
rural temples are uniformly white, and their 
spires are of the simplest form; but it is dif- 
ficult to convey, to those who have not seen 
them, an idea of the exquisite addition which 
they form to the beauty of the scenery. 

On a nearer approach, the situation of these 
villages, so profusely scattered over the moun- 
tains which surround the Italian lakes, is often 
interesting in the extreme. Placed on the 
summit of projecting rocks, or sheltered in the 
defile of secluded valleys, they exhibit every 
variety of aspect that can be imagined; but 
wherever situated, they add to the interest, or 
enhance the picturesque effect of the scene. 
The woods by which they are surrounded, and 
which, from a distance, have the appearance 
of a continued forest, are in reality formed, 
for the most part, of the walnuts and sweet 
chestnuts, which grow on the gardens that 
belong to the peasantry, and conceal beneath 
their shade, vineyards, corn-fields, and orchards. 
Each cottager lias his little domain, which is 
cultivated by his own family; a single chest- 
nut, and a few mulberry trees, with a small 
vineyard, constitutes often the whole of their 
humble property. On this little spot, however, 
they find wherewithal both to satisfy their 
wants and to occupy their industry; the chil- 



dren take care of the mulberries and the silk 
worms, which are here produced in great 
abundance; the husband dresses the vineyard, 
or works in the garden, as the season may 
require. On an incredibly small piece of 
ground, a numerous family live, in, what ap- 
pears to them, ease and affluence ; and if they 
can maintain themselves during the year, and 
pay their rent at its termination, their desires 
never go beyond the space of their own em- 
ployment. 

In this simple and unambitious style of life, 
it may easily be conceived what the general 
character of the peasantry must be. Gene- 
rally speaking, they are a simple, kind-hearted, 
honest people, grateful to the last degree for 
the smallest share of kindness, and always 
willing to share with a stranger the produce 
of their little domains. The crimes of murder 
and robbery are almost unknown, at least 
among the peasantry themselves, although, on 
the great roads in their vicinity, banditti are 
sometimes to be found. But if a stranger 
lives in the country, and reposes confidence in 
the people, he will find himself as secure, and 
more respected, than in most other parts of 
the world. 

There is one delightful circumstance which 
occurs in spring in the vicinity of these lakes, 
to which a northern traveller is but little ac- 
customed. During the months of April and 
May, the woods are filled with nightingales, 
and thousands of these little choristers pour 
forth their strains every night, with a richness 
and melody of which it is impossible to form 
a conception. In England we are accustomed 
frequently to hear the nightingale, and his song 
has been' celebrated in poetry from the earliest 
periods of our history. But it is generally a 
single song to which we listen, or at most a 
few only, which unite to enliven the stillness 
of the night. But on the banks of the lake of 
Como, thousands of nightingales are to be 
found in every wood ; they rest in every tree, — 
they pour forth their melody on the roof of 
every cottage. Wherever you walk du ring the 
delightful nights of April or May, you hear the 
unceasing strains of these unseen warblers, 
swelling on the evening gales, or dying away, 
as you recede from the wood* or thickets 
where they dwell. The soft cadence and me- 
lodious swelling of this heavenly choir, re- 
sembles more the enchanting sounds of the 
Eolian harp than any thing produced by mor- 
tal organs. To those who have seen the lake 
of Como, with such accompaniments, during 
the serenity of a summer evening, and with 
the surrounding headlands and mountains re- 
flected on its placid waters, there are few scenes 
in nature, and few moments in life, which can 
be the source of such delightful recollection. 

The forms of the mountains which surround 
the Italian lakes are somewhat similar to those 
that are to be met with in the Highlands of 
Scotland, or at the Lake of Killarney ; but the 
great superiority which they possess over an) 
thing in this country, consists in the gay and 
smiling aspect which nature there exhibits. The 
base only of the Highland hills is clothed with 
wood ; huge and shapeless swells of heath 
form the upper parts of the mountains ; and 



156 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



the summits partake of the gloomy character 
which the tint of brown or purple throws over 
the scene. But the mountains which surround 
the Italian lakes are varied to the summit with 
life and animation. The woods ascend to the 
highest peaks, and clothe the most savage 
cliffs in a robe of verdure; white and sunny 
villages rise one above another, in endless 
succession, to the upper parts of the moun- 
tains ; and innumerable churches, on every 
projecting point, mark the sway of religion, 
even in the most remote and inaccessible si- 
tuations. The English lakes are often cold 
and cheerless, from the reflection of a dark or 
lowering sky; but the Italian lakes are per- 
fectly blue, and partake of the brilliant colours 
with which the firmament is filled. In the 
morning, in particular, when the level sun 
glitters on the innumerable white villages 
which surround the Lago Maggiore, the reflec- 
tion of the cottages, and steeples, and woods, 
in the blue and glassy surface of the lake, 
seems to realize the descriptions of the poets in 
their happiest and most inspired veins. 

The Lago Maggiore is the most celebrated of 
these lakes, because it lies most in the way of 
ordinary travellers; but, in variety of forms, 
and in the grandeur of the surrounding objects, 
it is decidedly inferior to the Lago Lugano, 
which is, perhaps, upon the whole, the most 
beautiful lake in Europe. The mountains 
which surround this lake are not only very 
lofty, from 4000 to 5000 feet high, but broken 
into a thousand fantastic forms, and split with 
chasms of the most terrific description. On 
one of the loftiest of these pinnacles, immedi- 
ately above the centre of the lake, is placed the 
castle of St. Salvador ; and the precipice, from 
its turrets to the surface of the water, is cer- 
tainly not less than 2000 feet. Nevertheless, 
this stupendous cliff is clothed, in every cre- 
vice where the birch can fix its root, with 
luxuriant woods ; and so completely does this 
soft covering change the character of the scene, 
that even this dreadful precipice is rather a 
beautiful than a terrific object. The great 
characteristic and principal beauty of the Lago 
Lugano, arises from its infinite variety, occa- 
sioned by the numbers of mountains which 
project into its centre, and by presenting an 
infinite variety of headlands, promontories, and 
bays, give it rather the appearance of a great 
number of small lakes connected together, than 
of one extensive sheet of water. Nor can 
imagination itself conceive any thing equal to 
the endless variety of scenery, which is pre- 
sented by following the deeply indented shores 
of this lake, or the varied effect of the number- 
less villages and churches, which present 
themselves at every turn, to relieve and ani- 
mate the scene. 

Foreigners, from every part of Europe, are 
accustomed to speak of the Boromean Islands 
with a degree of enthusiasm which raises the 
expectation to too high a pitch, and of course 
is apt to produce disappointment. They are 
laid out in the Italian style of gardening, with 
stiff alleys, marble fountains, statues, terraces, 
and other works of art. But this style, how- 
ever curious or meritorious in itself, and as a 
specimen of the skill or dexterity of the gar- 



dener, is universally allowed to be ill adapted 
to the scenery of real nature, and is more par- 
ticularly out of place in the Italian lakes, 
where the vast and broken ridge of the Alps 
forms the magnificent distance, and gives the 
prevailing character to the scene. 

The Isola Madre is the most pleasing of these 
celebrated islands, being covered with wood in 
the interior, and adorned round the shores 
with a profusion of the most beautiful flower- 
ing shrubs. It is difficult to imagine a more 
splendid prospect than the view from this 
island, looking towards the ridge of the Simplon. 
Numerous white villages, placed at intervals 
along the shore, enliven the green luxuriant 
woods which descend to the lake ; and in the 
farther distance, the broken and serrated ridge 
of the mountains, clustering round the snowy 
peaks of Monte Rosa, combines the grandeur 
of Alpine with the softness of Italian scenery. 
The buildings, which are so beautifully dis- 
posed along the shore, partake of the elegance 
of the scene ; they are distinguished, for the 
most part, by the taste which seems to be the 
native growth of the soil of Italy; and the lake 
itself resembles a vast mirror, in which the 
splendid scenery which surrounds it is reflected, 
with more even than its original beauty. 

The lake of Como, as is well known, was 
the favourite residence of Pliny; and a villa 
on its shore bears the name of the Villa Pli- 
niana; but whether it is built on the scite of 
the Roman philosopher's dwelling, has not 
been ascertained. The immediate vicinity, 
however, of the intermitting spring, which he 
has so well described, makes it probable that 
the ancient villa was at no great distance from 
the modern one which bears its name. Eustace 
has dwelt, with his usual eloquence, on the 
interest which this circumstance gives to this 
beautiful lake. 

Towards its upper end, the lake of Como 
assumes a different aspect from that by which 
it is distinguished at its lower extremity. The 
hills in the vicinity of Como, and as far to the 
north as Menagio, are soft in their forms, and 
being clothed to their summits with vineyards 
and woods, they present rather a beautiful 
than a sublime spectacle. But towards the 
upper end the scene assumes a more savage 
character. The chestnut woods and orange 
groves no longer appear; the oak and the fir 
cover the bold and precipitous banks which 
hang over the lake ; and the snowy peaks of 
the Bernhardin and Mount Splugen rise in 
gloomy magnificence at the extremity of the 
scene. On approaching Chiavenna, the broad 
expanse of water dwindles into a narrow 
stream ; the banks on either side approach so 
near, as to give the scenery the appearance of 
a mountain valley ; and the Alps, which close 
it in, are clothed with forests of fir, or present 
vast and savage precipices of rock. From 
this point there is an easy passage over the 
Bernhardin to the Rheinthal, and the interest- 
ing country of the Grisons; and the Vol de 
Misox, through which the road leads, is one of 
the most beautiful on the southern side of the 
Alps, and particularly remarkable for the 
magnificent castles with which its projecting 
points are adorned. 



ITALY. 



157 



The tour which is usually followed in the 
Italian lakes, is to visit first the Lago Maggiore, 
and then drive to Como, and ascend to the 
Villa Pliniana, or to Menagio, and return to 
Como or Lecco. By following this course, 
however, the Lugo Lugano is wholly omitted, 
which is perhaps the most picturesque of all 
the three. The better plan is to ascend from 
Baveno, on the Lago Maggiore, to the upper 
end of that lake; and after exploring its varied 
beauties, land at Luvino, and cross from thence 
to Ponte Tresa, and there embark for Lugano, 
from whence you reach Porlezza by water, 
through the most magnificent part of the Lago 
Lugano ; from thence cross to Menagio, on the 
lake . of Como, whence, as from a central 
point, the traveller may ascend to Chiavenna, 
or descend to Lecco or Como, as his time or 
inclination may prescribe. 

It is one most interesting characteristic of 
the people who dwell on these beautiful lakes, 
that they seem to be impressed with a genuine 
and unaffected piety. The vast number of 
churches placed in every village, and crown- 
ing every eminence, is a proof of how much 
has been done for the service of religion. But 
it is a more interesting spectacle, to behold 
the devotion with which the ordinances of 
religion are observed in all these places of 
worship. Numerous as the churches are, they 
seem to be hardly able to contain the numbers 
who frequent them ; and it is no unusual 
spectacle to behold crowds of both sexes 
kneeling on the turf in the church-yard on 
Sunday forenoon, who could not find room in 
the church itself. There is something singu- 
larly pleasing in such manifestation of simple 
devotion. Whatever may be the diversity in 
points of faith, which separate Christians from 
each other, the appearance of sincere piety, 
more especially in the poorer classes, is an 
object of interest, and fitted to produce respect. 
"We are too apt to imagine, in England, that 
real devotion is little felt in Catholic states ; 
but whoever has travelled in the Alps, or 
dwelt on the Italian Lakes, must be convinced 
that this belief is without foundation. The 
poor people who attend these churches, are in 
general neatly, and even elegantly, dressed; 
and the Scripture pieces which are placed 
above the altar, rude as they may be, are dis- 
tinguished by a beauty of expression, and a 
grace of design, which proves in the most 
striking way how universally a taste for the 
fine arts is diffused throughout the peasantry 
of Italy. While gliding along the placid sur- 
face of these lakes, the traveller beholds with 
delight the crowds of well-dressed people who 
descend from the churches that are placed 
along their shores ; and it is sometimes a most 
interesting incident, amidst the assemblage of 
forests and precipices which the scenery pre- 
sents, to see the white dresses of the peasantry 
winding down the almost perpendicular face 
of the mountains, or emerging from the luxu- 
riant forests with which their sides are clothed. 

The climate in these lakes is delightful. The 
vicinity of the mountain indeed attracts fre- 
quent rains, which has rendered Como pro- 
verbial in Lombardy for the wetness of its 
climate ; but when the shower is over, the sky 



reassumes its delicious blue, and the sun 
shines with renovated splendour on the green 
woods and orange groves which adorn the 
mountain sides. Perhaps the remarkable and 
beautiful greenness of the foliage, which cha- 
racterizes the scenery of all these lakes, is 
owing to the frequent showers which the 
height of the surrounding mountains occa- 
sions; and if so, we owe to them one of the 
most singular and characteristic beauties by 
which they are distinguished. 

Italy comprises four great divisions: in 
each of which the face of nature, the mode of 
cultivation, and the condition of the people, is 
very different from what it is in the others. 

The first of these embraces the vast plain 
which lies between the Alps and the Apen- 
nines, and extends from Coni on the west to 
the Adriatic on the east. It is bounded on the 
south by the Apennines, which, branching off 
from the Maritime Alps, run in a south-easterl}' 
direction to the neighbourhood of Lorretto; 
and on the north by the chain of the Alps, 
which presents a continued face of precipices 
from sea to sea. This rich and beautiful plain 
is, with the exception of a few inconsiderable 
hills, a perfect level; insomuch that for two 
hundred miles there is not a single ascent to 
be met with. Towards its western end, in the 
plain of Piedmont, the soil is light and sandy ; 
but it becomes richer as you proceed to the 
eastward, and from Lodi to Ferrara is com- 
posed of the finest black mould. It is watered 
by numberless streams, which descend from 
the adjacent mountains, and roll their tributary 
waters to the Po, and this supply of water, 
joined to the unrivalled fertility of the soil, 
renders this district the richest, in point of 
agricultural produce, that exists in Europe. 
An admirable system of cultivation has long 
been established in this fertile plain ; and three 
successive crops annually reward the labours 
of the husbandman. 

The second extends over all the declivities 
of the Apennines, from the frontiers of France 
to the southern extremity of Calabria. This 
immense region comprises above half of the 
whole superficial extent of Italy, and main- 
tains a very great proportion of its inhabitants. 
It everywhere consists of swelling hills, rapid 
descents, and narrow valleys, and yields spon- 
taneously the choicest fruits. The olive, the 
vine, the fig tree, the pomegranate, the sweet 
chestnut, and all the fruits of northern climates, 
flourish in the utmost luxuriance on the sunny 
slopes of Tuscany and the Roman States ; while 
in Naples and Calabria, in addition to these, 
are to be found the orange tree, the citron, the 
palm, and the fruits of tropical regions. The 
higher parts of these mountains are covered 
by magnificent forests of sweet chestnuts, 
which yield subsistence to a numerous popu- 
lation, at the height of many thousand feet 
above the sea; while, at the summit, pasture^ 
are to be found, similar to those of the Che- 
viot Hills in Scotland. 

The third region comprises the plains which 
lie between the Apennines and the Mediterra- 
nean, and extends from the neighbourhood of 
Pisa to the mountains of Terracino. This dis 
trict, once covered by a numerous population, 
O 



158 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



and cultivated in the most careful manner, is 
now almost a desert. It is the region of insa- 
lubrious air; and no means have yet been 
devised by which it is possible to enable the 
human race to flourish under its pestilential 
influence. After leaving the highest state of 
civilization in Florence or Rome, the traveller 
is astonished to find himself in the midst of 
vast plains, over which numerous flocks of 
cattle wander at large under the care of shep- 
herds mounted on horseback, and armed after 
the fashion of the steppes of Tartary. This 
division includes under it all the plains which 
lie between the Apennines and the Mediterra- 
nean, in the Neapolitan territory, among which 
the Maremma of Pestuni is most conspicuous; 
and nothing but the vast population of N;iples 
prevents its celebrated Campagna from relaps- 
ing into the same desolate state. 

The fourth great division comprehends the 
plains which lie to the eastward of the Apen- 
nines, in the kingdom of Naples, and is bound- 
ed by the Adriatic sea on the one side, and the 
irregular line of the mountains on the other. It 
is in some places from fifty to one hundred miles 
broad, and in others the mountains approach 
the sea-shore. The country is flat, or rises into 
extensive downs, and is cultivated in large 
farms, where it is under agricultural manage- 
ment; but a great proportion is devoted entirely 
to pasturage. Immense forests of olive are 
to be met with in this remote district, and the 
hills are covered with vines, and oranges, and 
other fruits, with corn growing under them. 

The only range of mountains which pro- 
perly and exclusively belongs to Italy is the 
Apennines; and they extend over more than 
half of the country. Their height is very va- 
rious ; in the vicinity of Genoa they rise to 
about 4500 feet; above Pontrimoli, on the 
borders of Tuscany and Lombardy, they reach 
5500 to 6000 feet, and the great ridge which 
stretches from Bologna by Valombrosa, to the 
south-east, rises in some places to between 
6000 and 7000. They are not, in general, very 
rocky ; at least it is only in their higher emi- 
nences that this character appears. Their 
lower parts, everywhere almost, are covered 
with fruit trees, under the shade of which, in 
the southern exposures, crops of grain are 
brought to maturity. Higher up, the sweet 
chestnut covers the ascent, and supports an 
immense population at an elevation above the 
sea where no food for man could be procured 
in our climate. The pine, the beech, and the 
fir, occupy those higher regions in which are 
Valombrosa, Lavernia, and Camaldoli ; and at 
the summits of all, the open dry pastures fur- 
nish subsistence to numerous flocks. This 
great capability of the Apennines to yield food 
for the use of man, is the cause of the extraor- 
dinary populousness of its slopes. In the 
remotest recesses the traveller discovers vil- 
lages and towns ; and on the face of mountains 
where the eye at a distance can discern nothing 
but wood, he finds, on a nearer approach, every 
spot of ground carefully cultivated. The vil- 
lages and towns are commonly situated on the 
summits of eminences, and frequently sur- 
rounded by walls and towers ; a practice which 
began in the turbulent periods of the Italian re- 



publics, and has been since continued from 
the dread of malaria in the bottom of the val- 
leys. It adds greatly to the picturesque effect 
of the mountain scenery, and gives it a cha- 
racter altogether peculiar. In the Tuscan 
states, the lower ranges of the Apennines have 
been the object of the utmost care, and of an 
almost inconceivable expenditure of capital. 
They are regularly cut in terraces, and when- 
ever an opportunity occurs, water is brought 
from the adjoining canals to every field, so 
that the whole valley is as it were covered 
with a network of small streams, which convey 
their freshness all around. The olives and 
figs which nourish in this delightful region are 
foreign to the Tuscan soil ; there is not a tree 
there which is the spontaneous production of 
nature; they are all planted and pruned by the 
hand of man. 

Nothing can be imagined more sterile in 
itself, or more adverse to any agricultural im- 
provement, than the aspect of nature in the 
Apennines. Their sides present a series of 
broken rocks, barren slopes, or arid cliffs. 
The roots of the bushes, laid bare by the au- 
tumnal rains, are, by degrees, dried up by the 
heat of the sun. They perish, and leave nothing 
behind them but a few odoriferous shrubs dis- 
persed on the rocks to cover the wreck. The 
narrow ravines between them present, in 
summer, only the dry beds of torrents, in 
which fallen trees, rocks, and gravel, are 
accumulated by the violence of the winter 
rains. This debris is brought down by the 
torrents into the wider valleys, and whole tracts 
of country are desolated by a sterile mass of 
stone and gravel. Thus the mountains and 
the valleys at their feet seem equally incapa- 
ble of culture; but the industry of the Italians 
has overcome these obstacles, and converted 
mountains, to appearance the most sterile that 
imagination could conceive, into a succession 
of gardens, in which every thing that is most 
delightful, as well as useful, is assembled. 

This astonishing metamorphosis has been 
effected by the introduction of the terrace sys- 
tem of culture, an improvement which seems 
to have been unknown to the ancient Romans, 
and to have spread in Europe with the return 
of the Crusaders in the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries. (Chateauvienx, 300.) Nothing could 
oppose the destructive force of the torrents, but 
altering the surface of the hills, and thereby 
breaking the course of the waters. This was 
an immense work, for it required the whole 
soil to be displaced, and built up by means of 
artificial walls into successive terraces; and 
this in many places could be effected only by 
breaking solid rocks, and bringing a new soil 
from distant places. 

The artificial land, so dearly purchased, is 
designed for the cultivation of fruits and vege- 
tables. The terraces are always covered with 
fruit-trees placed in a reflected sun. Amidst 
the reverberations of so many walls, the fruit 
is most abundant and superior in its kind. 
No room is lost in these limited situations, — 
the vine extends its branches along the walls ; 
a hedge formed of the same vine branches 
surrounds each terrace, and covers it with 
verdure. In the corners formed by the meeting 



ITALY. 



159 



of the supporting walls, fig-trees are planted 
to vegetate under tl <'ir protection. The owner 
takes advantage ol every vacant space left be- 
tween the olive-tit! s to raise melons and vege- 
tables ; so that he obtains on a very limited ex- 
tent, olive, grapes, p megranates, and melons. 
So great is the produce of this culture that, 
under good management, half the crop of seven 
acres is sufficient for a family of five persons : 
being little more than the produce of three- 
fourths of an acre to each soul. This little 
space is often divided into more than twenty 
terraces. 

A great part of the mountainous part of 
Italy has adopted this admirable culture: and 
this accounts for the great population which 
everywhere inhabit the Italian mountains, and 
explains the singular fact, that, in scenes 
where nothing but continued foliage meets the 
eye, the traveller finds, on a nearer approach, 
villages and hamlets, and all the signs of a 
numerous peasantry. 

Continued vigilance is requisite to maintain 
these works. If the attention of the husband- 
man is intermitted for any considerable time, 
the violence of the rains destroys what it had 
cost so much labour to create. Storms and 
torrents wash down the soil, and the terraces 
are broken through or overwhelmed by the 
rubbish, which is brought down from the 
higher parts of the mountain. Every thing 
returns rapidly to its former state ; the vigour 
of southern vegetation covers the ruins of 
human industry: and there soon remains only 
shapeless vestiges covered by briers. 

The system of irrigation in the valley of the 
Arno is a most extraordinary monument of 
human industry. Placed between two ridges 
of mountains, one of them very elevated, it was 
periodically devastated by numerous torrents, 
which were precipitated from the mountains, 
charged with stone and rubbish. To control 
these destructive inundations, means were 
contrived to confine the course of the torrents 
within strong walls, which serve at the same 
time for the formation of a great number of 
canals. At regular distances, openings are 
formed below the mean level of the stream, 
that the water may run out laterally, overflow 
the land, and remain on it long enough to 
deposit the mud with which it is charged. A 
great many canals, by successive outlets of the 
water, divide the principal current and check 
its rapidity. These canals are infinitely sub- 
divided, and to such a degree, that there is not 
a single square of land, which is not sur- 
rounded by them. They are all lined with 
walls, built with square bricks; the scarcity 
of water rendering the most vigilant economy 
of it necessary. A number of small bridges 
connect the multitude of little islands, into 
which these canals subdivide the country. 
These works are still kept in good repair ; but 
the whole wealth of Tuscany could not now 
furnish the sums requisite for their construc- 
tion. That was done by Florence in the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in the days 
of her republican freedom. 

The third agricultural division of Italy, is 
the Maremma, or the plains on the sea-shore 
in Tuscany, and the Roman States, where the 



prevalence of the malaria renders it impossible 
to live permanently. This region is every- 
where divided into great estates, and let in 
large farms. The Maremma of Rome, forty 
leagues in length and from ten to fifteen in 
breadth, and which feeds annually 67,000 
horned cattle, is cultivated by only eighty farm- 
ers. These farmers live in Rome or Sienna, 
for the unhealthiness of the atmosphere pre- 
cludes the possibility of their dwelling on the 
lands they cultivate. Each farm has on it 
only a single house, which rises in the midst 
of desolation. No garden, or orchards, or 
meadows, announce the vicinity of a human 
habitation. It stands alone in the midst of a 
vast solitude, with the cattle pasturing up to 
the walls of the dwelling. 

The whole wealth of these great farms con- 
sists in their cattle. The farm servants are 
comparatively few, and they are constantly 
on horseback. Armed with a gun and a lance, 
the shepherds, as in the wilds of Tartary, are 
constantly in the open air tending the herds 
committed to their care. They receive no 
fixed wages, but are paid in cattle, which graze 
with the herds of their masters. The mildness of 
the climate permits the grass to grow during all 
the winter, and so the flocks are maintained there 
in that season. In summer, as the excessive heat 
renders the pastures parched and scanty, the 
flocks are sent to the highest ridges of the Apen- 
nines in quest of cool air and fresh herbage. 
The oxen, however, and cows of the Hungarian 
breed, are able both to bear the heat of sum- 
mer, and to find food during its continuance in 
the Maremma. They remain, therefore, during 
all the year; and the shepherds who tend them 
continue exposed to the pestilential air during 
the autumnal months. The woods are stocked 
with swine, and the marshes with buffaloes. 
So great is the quantity of the live-stock on 
these immense farms, that on one visited by 
Mr. Chafeauvieux were cattle to the value of 
16,000/. sterling, and the farmer had two other 
farms on which the stocking was of equal 
value. 

In the Terra di Lavoro, or Campagna of Na- 
ples, the extreme richness of the soil has given 
rise to a mode of culture different from any 
which has yet been described. The aspect of 
this great plain is, perhaps, the most striking 
in point of agricultural riches that exists in the 
world. The great heat of the sun renders it 
necessary that the grain should be shaded by 
trees ; and accordingly the whole country is 
intersected by rows of elms or willows, which 
divide it into small portions of half or three 
quarters of an acre each. A vine is planted, 
at the foot of every tree ; and such is the 
luxuriance of vegetation, that it not only rises 
in a few years to the very summit, but extends 
its branches in a lateral direction, so as to 
admit of festoons being trained from one tree 
to another. These trees are not pollarded as 
in Tuscany and Lombardy, but allowed to 
grow to their full height, so that it is not 
unusual to see a vine clustering around the 
top of a poplar sixty or eighty feet high. 
Under their shade the soil produces annually 
a double crop, one of which is of wheat oj 
maize. Melons are cultivated in great quan*} 



160 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



ties, and with hardly any manure. Thickets 
of fig-trees, of peaches, and aloes, grow spon- 
taneously on the borders of the fields. Groves 
of orange clothe the slopes, and spread their 



charming perfumes over the adjoining country ; 
while the rocky eminences are covered with 
vines, which produce fruits of the most deli- 
cious flavour. 



SCOTT, CAMPBELL, AND BYRON.* 



We have listened with admiration to the 
eloquent strains in which the first in rank-|- 
and the first in genius* have proposed the 
memory of the immortal bard whose genius 
we are this day assembled to celebrate; but I 
know not whether the toast which I have now 
to propose has not equal claims to our enthu- 
siasm. Your kindness and that of the com- 
mittee has intrusted to me the memory of three 
illustrious men — the far-famed successors of 
Burns, who have drank deep at the fountains 
of his genius, and proved themselves the worthy 
inheritors of his inspiration. And Scotland, 
I rejoice to say, can claim them all as her 
own. For if the Tweed has been immortalized 
by the grave, of Scott, the Clyde can boast the 
birthplace of Campbell, and the mountains 
of the Dee first inspired the muse of Byron. 
I rejoice at that burst of patriotic feeling ; I 
hail it as the presage, that as Ayrshire has 
raised a fitting monument to Burns, and Edin- 
burgh has erected a fitting structure to the 
author of Waverley, so Glasgow will, ere long, 
raise a worthy monument to the bard whose 
name will never die while hope pours its balm 
through the human heart ; and Aberdeen will, 
worthily, commemorate the. far-famed tra- 
veller who first inhaled the inspiration of na- 
ture amidst the clouds of Loch-na-Gar, and 
afterwards poured the light of his genius over 
those lands of the sun, where his descending 
orb sets — 

" Not as in northern climes obscurely brijht, 
But one unclouded blaze of living light." 

Scotland, my lord, may well be proud of hav- 
ing given birth to, or awakened the genius of 
such men ; but she can no longer call these 
exclusively her own — their names have be- 
come household words in every land. Man- 
kind claims them as the common inheritance 
of the numan race. Look around us, and we 
shall see on every side decisive proof how 
far and wide admiration for their genius has 
sunk into the hearts of men. What is it that 
attiacts strangers from every part of the world, 
into this distant land, and has more than com- 
pensated for a remote situation and a churlish 
soil, and given to our own northern isle a 
splendour unknown to the regions of the sun? 
What is it which has brought together this 
mighty assemblage, and united the ardent 



* Speech delivered at the Burns Festival, on 6th Au- 
gust, 1844, on proposing the memory of Scott, Campbell, 
and Byron. 

+ Earl of Eglinton, who presided. 

t Professor Wilson. 



and the generous from every part of the world, 
from the Ural mountains to the banks of the 
Mississippi, on the shores of an island in the 
Atlantic] My lord, it is neither the magni- 
ficence of our cities, nor the beauty of our 
valleys, the animation of our harbours, nor 
the stillness of our mountains: it is neither 
our sounding cataracts nor our spreading 
lakes: neither the wilds of nature we have 
subdued so strenuously, nor the blue hills we 
have loved so well. These beauties, great as 
they are, have been equalled in other lands ; 
these marvels, wondrous though they be, have 
parallels in other climes. It is the genius of 
her sons which have given Scotland her proud 
pre-eminence; this it is, more even than the 
shades of Bruce, of Wallace, and of Mary, 
which has rendered her scenes classic ground 
to the whole civilized world, and now brings 
pilgrims from the most distant parts of the 
earth, as on this day, to worship at the shrine 
of genius. 

Yet Albyn ! yet the praise be thine, 
Thy scenes with story to combine ; 
Thou bid'st him who by Roslin strays, 
List to the tale of other days. 
Midst Cartlahe crags thou showest the cave, 
The refuge of thy champion brave ; 
Giving each rock a storied tale, 
Pouring a lay through every dale; 
Knitting, as with a moral band, 
Thy story to thy native land ; 
Combining thus the interest high, 
Which genius lends to beauty's eye! 

But the poet who conceived these beautiful 
lines, has done more than all our ancestors' 
valour to immortalize the land of his birth ; 
for he has united the interest of truth with the 
charms of fiction, and peopled the realm not 
only with the shadows of time, but the crea- 
tions of genius. In those brilliant creations, 
as in the glassy wave, we behold mirrored the 
lights, the shadows, the forms of reality ; and 
yet 

So pure, so fair, the mirror gave, 

As if there lay beneath the wave, 

Secure from trouble, toil, and care, 

A world than earthly world more fair. 

Years have rolled on, but they have taken no- 
thing, they have added much, to the fame of 
those illustrious men. 

Time but the impression deeper makes, 
As streams their channels deeper wear. 

The voice of ages has spoken : it has given 
Campbell and Byron the highest place, with 
Burns, in lyric poetry, and destined Scott 
To rival all but Shakspeare's name below. 
Their names now shine in unapproachable 
splendour, far removed, like the fixed stars, 



SCOTT, CAMPBELL, AND BYRON. 



161 



from the clouds and the rivalry of a lower 
world. To the end of time, they will maintain 
their exalted station. Never will the culti- 
vated traveller traverse the sea of the Archipe- 
lago, that "The isles of Greece, the isles of 
Greece," will not recur to his recollection ; 
never will he approach the shores of Loch 
Katrine, that the image of Ellen Douglas will 
not be present to his memory; never will he 
gaze on the cliffs of Britain, that he will not 
thrill at the exploits of the " mariners of Eng- 
land, who guard our native seas." Whence 
has arisen this great, this universally acknow- 
ledged celebrity 1 My lord, it is hard to say 
whether we have most to admire the brilliancy 
of their fancy, or the creations of their genius, 
the beauty of their verses, or the magic of 
their language, the elevation of their thoughts, 
or the pathos of their conceptions. Yet can 
each boast a separate grace ; and their age 
has witnessed in every walk the genius of 
poetry elevated to its highest strain. In Scott 
it is variety of conception, truth and fidelity 
of delineation in character, graphic details of 
the olden time, which is chiefly to be admired. 
Who can read without transport his glowing 
descriptions of the age of chivalry 1 Its massy 
castles and gloomy vaults, its haughty nobles 
and beauteous dames, its gorgeous pageantry 
and prancing steeds, stand forth under his 
magic pencil with all the colours and bril- 
liancy of reality. We are present at the shock 
of armies, we hear the shouts of mortal com- 
batants, we see the flames of burning castles, 
we weep in the dungeon of captive innocence. 
Yet who has so well and truly delineated the 
less obtrusive but not less impressive scenes 
of humble life 1 Who has so faithfully por- 
trayed the virtues of the cottage ; who has done 
so much to elevate human nature, by exhibiting 
its dignity even in the abyss of misfortune; 
who has felt so truly and told so well "the 
might that slumbers in a peasant's arm !" In 
Byron it is the fierce contest of the passions, 
the yearning of a soul longing for the stern 
realities of life, amidst the seduction of its 
frivolity; the brilliant conceptions of a mind 
fraught with the imagery and recollections of 
the east, which chiefly captivates every mind. 
His pencil is literally " dipt in the orient hues 
of heaven." He transports us to enchanted 



ground, where the scenes which speak most 
powerfully to the heart of man are brought 
successively before our eyes. The east, with 
its deathless scenes and cloudless skies; its 
wooded steeps and mouldering fanes, its glassy 
seas and lovely vales, rises up like magic be- 
fore us. The haughty and yet impassioned 
Turk; the crouching but still gifted Greek; 
the wandering Arab, the cruel Tartar, the fa- 
natic Moslem, stand before us like livingbeings, 
they are clothed with flesh and blood. But 
there is one whose recent death we all deplore, 
but who has lighted " the torch of Hope at na- 
ture's funeral pile," who has evinced a yet 
higher inspiration. In Campbell, it is the mo- 
ral purposes to which he has directed his 
mighty powers, which is the real secret of his 
success; the lofty objects to which he has de- 
voted his life, which have proved his passport 
to immortality. To whatever quarter he has 
turned his mind, we behold the working of the 
same elevated spirit. Whether he paints the 
disastrous day, when, 

Oh bloodiest picture in the hook of Time, 
Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime ; 

or portrays with generous ardour the ima- 
ginary paradise on Susquehanna's shore, 
where 

The world was sad, the garden was a wild, 
And man, the hermit, sighed till woman smiled ; 

or transports us to that awful time when Chris- 
tian faith remains unshaken amidst the disso- 
lution of nature, 

And ships are drifting with their dead, 
To shores where all is dumb, 

we discern the same mind, seeing every ob- 
ject through its own sublime and lofty vision. 
Thence has arisen his deathless name. — It is 
because he has unceasingly contended for the 
best interests of humanity; because he has 
ever asserted the dignity of a human soul; be- 
cause he has never forgotten that amidst all 
the distinctions of time — 

"The rank is but the guinea stamp, 
The man's the gowd for a' that ;" 

because he has regarded himself as the high- 
priest of nature, and the world which we in- 
habit as the abode not merely of human cares 
and human joys, but as the temple of the liv- 
ing God, in which praise is due, and where 
service is to be performed. 



21 



oS 



162 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



SCHOOLS or design; 



We stand in this community in a very 
peculiar situation, and which loudly calls for 
immediate attention of all interested in their 
country's greatness. We have reached the very 
highest point of commercial greatness. Such 
has been the growth of our mechanical power, 
such the marvels of our commercial enter- 
prise ! But, when we turn to the station we oc- 
cupy in the arts of design, in these very arts 
in which, as a manufacturing community, we 
are so deeply interested, we see a very different 
spectacle. We see foreigners daily flocking 
from all parts of the world to the shores of the 
Clyde or the Mersey, to study our railways, 
and our canals ; to copy our machinery, to 
take models of our steam-vessels — but we see 
none coming to imitate our designs. On the 
contrary, we, who take the lead of all the world 
in mechanical invention, in the powers of art, 
are obliged to follow them in the designs to 
which these powers are to be applied. Gentle- 
men, this should not be. We have now arrived 
at that period of manufacturing progress, when 
we must take the lead in design, or we shall 
cease to have orders for performance — we 
must be the first in conception, or we will be 
the last in execution. To others, the Fine Arts 
may be a matter of gratification or ornament; 
to a manufacturing community it is one of 
life or death. We may, however, be encou- 
raged to hope that we may yet and ere long 
attain to eminence in the Fine Arts, from ob- 
serving how uniformly in past times com- 
mercial greatness has co-existed with purity 
of taste and the development of genius ; in so 
much that it is hard to say whether art has 
owed most to the wealth of commerce, or com- 
merce to the perfection of art. Was it not 
the wealth of inland commerce which, even in 
the deserts of Asia, reared up that great com- 
monwealth, which once, under the guidance 
of Zenobia, bade defiance to the armies of 
imperial Rome, and the ruins of which, at 
Tadmor and Palmyra, still attract the admira- 
tion of the traveller? Was it not the wealth 
of maritime commerce which, on the shores 
of the JEgean sea, raised that great republic 
which achieved a dominion over the minds of 
men more durable than that which had been 
reared by the legions of Caesar, or the phalanx 
of Alexandei 1 Was it not the manufactures 
of Tuscany .vhich gave birth at Florence to 
that immonal school of painting, the works 
of which still attract the civilized world to the 
shores of the Arno? The velvets of Genoa, the 
jewelry of Venice, long maintained their as- 
cendency after the political importance of 
these republics had declined ; and the school 
of design established sixty years ago at Lyons 
has enabled its silk manufactures to preserve 
the lead in Europe — despite the carnage of the 
Convention, and the wars of Napoleon. In 

* Speech delivered on Nov. 28, 1843, in proposing the 
establishment of a School of Design in Glasgow. 



Flanders and Holland the wealth and enter- 
prise of commerce, notwithstanding the dis- 
advantages of a level soil, a cloudy atmosphere, 
and a humid climate, have produced the im- 
mortal works of Rubens, Vandyke, and Rem- 
brandt. Why should a similar result not take 
place here 1 Arrived at the summit of manu- 
facturing greatness, why should we be second 
to any in the arts of design 1 Have they pos- 
sessed advantages which we do not enjoy 1 
Had they finer cataracts than the Falls of the 
Clyde, or glens more romantic than Cartland 
Crags — had they nobler oaks than those of 
Cadzow, or ruins more imposing than those 
of Bothwell — had they galleries finer than the 
halls of Hamilton, or lakes more lovely than 
Loch Lomond, or mountains more sublime 
than those ofArran? Gentlemen, within two 
hours' journey from Glasgow are to be found 
combined 

"Whate'er Lorrain hath touched with softening hup, 
Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew." 

The wealth is here, the enterprise is here, 
the materials are here; nothing is wanting 
but the hand of genius to cast these precious 
elements into the mould of beauty — the lofty 
spirit, the high aspirations which, aiming at 
greatness, never fail to attain it. Are we to 
be told that we cannot do these things; that 
like the Russians we can imitate but cannot 
conceive 1 It is not in the nation of Smith 
and of Watt, — it is not in the land of Burns 
and Scott, — it is not in the country of Shak- 
speare and Milton, — it is not in the empire of 
Reynolds and Wren, that we can give any 
weight to that argument. Nor is it easy 
to believe that the same genius which has 
drawn in such enchanting colours the lights 
and shadows of Scottish life, might not, if 
otherwise directed, have depicted, with equal 
felicity, the lights and shadows of Scottish 
scenery. We have spoken of our interests, 
we have spoken of our capabilities, — we have 
spoken of what other nations have done ; — but 
there are greater things done than these. No 
one indeed can doubt that it is in the moral and 
religious feelings of the people, that the broad 
and deep foundations of national prosperity 
can alone be laid, and that every attempt to 
attain durable greatness on any other basis 
will prove nugatory. But we are not only 
moral and intellectual, we are active agents. 
We long after gratification — we thirst for en- 
joyment ; and the experienced observer of 
man will not despise the subsidiary, but still 
important aid to be derived in the great work 
of moral elevation, from a due direction of the 
active propensities. And he is not the least 
friend to his species, who, in an age peculiar- 
ly vehement in desire, discovers gratifications 
which do not corrupt — enjoyments which do 
not degrade. But if this is true of enjoyments 
simply innocent, what shall we say of those 
which refine, which not only do not lead to 



LAMARTINE. 



163 



vice, but exalt to virtue? — which open to the 
peasant, equally with the prince, that pure 
gratification which arises to all alike from the 
contemplation of the grand and the beautiful 
in Art and in Nature 1 We have now reached 
that point where such an election can no 



longer be delayed. Our wealth is so great, it 
has come on us so suddenly, it will corrupt if 
it does not refine ; if not directed to the arts 
which raised Athens to immortality, it wiii 
sink us to those which hurled Babylon to per- 
dition. 



LAMARTINE/ 



It is remarkable, that although England is 
the country in the world which has sent forth 
the greatest number of ardent and intrepid 
travellers to explore the distant parts of the 
earth, yet it can by no means furnish an array 
of writers of travels which will bear a compa- 
rison with those whom France can boast. In 
skilful navigation, daring adventure, and heroic 
perseverance, indeed, the country of Cook and 
Davis, of Bruce and Park, of Mackenzie and 
Buckingham, of Burckhardt and Byron, of Par- 
ry and Franklin, may well claim the pre-emi- 
nence of all others in the world. An English- 
man first circumnavigated the globe; an 
Englishman alone has seen the fountains of 
the Nile ; and, five years after the ardent spi- 
rit of Columbus had led his fearful crews 
across the Atlantic, Sebastian Cabot dis- 
covered the shores of Newfoundland, and 
planted the British standard in the regions 
destined to be peopled with the overflowing 
multitudes of the Anglo-Saxon race. 

But if we come to the literary works which 
have followed these ardent and energetic ef- 
forts, and which are destined to perpetuate 
their memory to future times — the interesting 
discoveries which have so much extended our 
knowledge and enlarged our resources — the 
contemplation is by no means, to an inhabitant 
of these islands, equally satisfactory. The 
British traveller is essentially a man of en- 
ergy and action, but rarely of contemplation 
or eloquence. He is seldom possessed of the 
scientific acquirements requisite to turn to the 
best account the vast stores of new and original 
information which are placed within his reach. 
He often observes and collects facts ; but it is 
as a practical man, or for professional pur- 
poses, rather than as a philosopher. The ge- 
nius of the Anglo-Saxon race — bold, sagacious, 
and < nterprising, rather than contemplative 
and scientific — nowhere appears more strongly 
than in the accounts of the numerous and in- 
trepid travellers whom they are continually 
sending forth into every part of the earth. We 
admire their vigour, we are moved by their hard- 
ships, we are enriched by their discoveries; 
but if we turn to our libraries for works to con- 
vey to future ages an adequate and interesting 
account of these fascinating adventures, we 
shall, in general, experience nothing but dis- 
appointment. Few of them are written with 
the practised hand, the graphic eye, necessary 
to convey vivid pictures to future times; 



* Blackwood's Magazine, Nov. 1844. 



and though numerous and valuable books of 
travels, as works of reference, load the shelves 
of our libraries, there are surprisingly few 
which are fitted, from the interest and vivacity 
of the style in which they are written, to pos- 
sess permanent attractions for mankind. 

One great cause of this remarkable peculi- 
arity is without doubt to be found in the widely 
different education of the students in our uni- 
versities, and our practical men. In the for- 
mer, classical attainments are in literature the 
chief, if not exclusive, objects of ambition ; 
and in consequence, the young aspirants for 
fame, who issue from these learned retreats, 
have their minds filled with the charms and 
associations of antiquity, to the almost entire 
exclusion of objects of present interest and im- 
portance. The vigorous practical men, again, 
who are propelled by the enterprise and exer- 
tions of our commercial towns, are sagacious 
and valuable observers ; but they have seldom 
the cultivated minds, pictorial eye, or powers 
of description, requisite to convey vivid or in- 
teresting impressions to others. Thus our 
scholars give us little more than treatises on 
inscriptions, and disquisitions on the sites of 
ancient towns; while the accounts of our ac- 
tive men are chiefly occupied with commercial 
inquiries, or subjects connected with trade and 
navigation. The cultivated and enlightened tra- 
veller, whose mind is alike open to the charm 
of ancient story and the interest of modern 
achievement — who is classical without being 
pedantic, graphic and yet faithful, enthusiastic, 
and yet accurate, discursive and at the same 
time imaginative, is almost unknown amongst 
us. It will continue to be so as long as edu- 
cation in our universities is exclusively devot- 
ed to Greek and Latin verses, or the higher ma- 
thematics; and in academies, to book-keeping 
and the rule of three ; while so broad and sul 
len a line as heretofore is drawn between the 
studies of our scholars and the pursuits of our 
practical citizens. To travel to good purpose 
requires a mind stored with much and varied 
information, in science, statistics, geography, 
literature, history, and poetry. To describe 
what the traveller has seen, requires, in addi 
tion to this, the eye of a painter, the soul of a 
poet, and the hand of apractised composer. Pro- 
bably it will be deemed no easy matter to find 
such a combination in any country or in any 
age; and most certainly the system of education, 
neither at our learned universities nor our com- 
mercial academies, is fitted to produce it. 

It is from inattention to the vast store pi 



164 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



previous information requisite to make an ac- 
complished traveller, and still more a writer 
of interesting travels, that failures in this 
branch of literature are so glaring and so fre- 
quent. In other departments of knowledge, 
a certain degree of information is felt to be 
requisite before a man can presume to write 
a book. He cannot produce a treatise on ma- 
thematics without knowing at least Euclid, 
nor a work on history without having read 
Hume, nor on political economy without 
having acquired a smattering of Adam Smith. 
But in regard to travels, no previous informa- 
tion is thought to be requisite. If the person 
who sets out on a tour has only money in his 
pocket, and health to get to his journey's end, he 
is deemed sufficiently qualified to come out 
with his two or three post octavos. If he is 
an Honourable, or known at Almack's, so much 
the better; that will ensure the sale of the first 
edition. If he can do nothing else, he can at 
least tell the dishes which he got to dinner at 
the inns, and the hotels where comfortable 
beds are to be found. This valuable informa- 
tion, interspersed with a few descriptions of 
scenes, copied from guide-books, and anecdotes 
picked up at tables-d'hote or on board steam- 
boats, constitute the stock in trade of many an 
adventurer who embarks in the speculation 
of paying by publication the expenses of his 
travels. We have no individuals in view in 
these remarks; we speak of things in general, 
as they are, or rather have been ; for we be- 
lieve these ephemeral travels, like other ephe- 
merals, have had their day, and are fast dying 
out. The market has become so glutted with 
them that they are, in a great many instances, 
unsaleable. 

The classical .avellers of England, from 
Addison to Eustace and Clarke, constitute an 
important and valuable body of writers in this 
branch of literature, infinitely superior to the 
fashionable tours which rise up and disappear- 
like bubbles on the surface of society. It is 
impossible to read these elegant productions 
without feeling the mind overspread with the 
charm which arises from the exquisite remains 
and heart-stirring associations with which they 
are filled. But their interest is almost exclu- 
sively classical ; they are invaluable to the ac- 
complished scholar, but they speak in an un- 
known tongue to the great mass of men. They 
see nature only through the medium of anti- 
quity; beautiful in their allusion to Greek or 
Roman remains, eloquent in the descriptions 
of scenes alluded to in the classical writers, 
they have dwelt little on the simple scenes of 
the unhistoric world. To the great moral and 
social, questions wh ich now agitate society, and 
so strongly move the hearts of the great body 
of men, they are entire strangers. Their works 
are the elegant companions of the scholar or 
the antiquary, not the heart-stirring friends of 
the cottage on the fireside. 

Inferior to Britain in the energy and achieve- 
ments of the travellers whom she has sent 
forth, and beyond measure beneath her in the 
amount of the addition she has made to geo- 
graphical science, France is yet greatly supe- 
rior, at least of late years, in the literary and 
scientific attainments of the wanderers whose 



works have been given to the world. Four 
among these stand pre-eminent, whose works, 
in very different styles, are at the head of Eu- 
ropeon literature in this interesting department 
—Humboldt, Chateaubriand, Michaud, and La- 
martine. Their styles are so various, and the 
impressions produced by reading them so dis- 
tinct, that it is difficult to believe that they have 
arisen in the same nation and age of the world. 
Humboldt is, in many respects, and perhaps 
upon the whole, at the head of the list; and to 
his profound and varied works we hope to be 
able to devote a future paper. He unites, in 
a degree that perhaps has never before been 
witnessed, the most various qualities, and 
which, from the opposite characters of mind 
which they require, are rarely found in unison. 
A profound philosopher, an accurate observer 
of nature, an unwearied statist, he is at the 
same time an eloquent writer, an incompara- 
ble describer, and an ardent friend of social 
improvement. Science owes to his indefati- 
gable industry many of her most valuable ac- 
quisitions : geography, to his intrepid perse- 
verance, many of its most important discove- 
ries ; the arts, to his poetic eye and fervid elo- 
quence, many of their brightest pictures. He 
unites the austere grandeur of the exact 
sciences to the bewitching charm of the fine 
arts. It is this very combination which pre- 
vents his works from being generally popular. 
The riches of his knowledge, the magnitude 
of his contributions to scientific discovery, 
the fervour of his descriptions of nature, al- 
ternately awaken our admiration and excite 
our surprise; but they oppress the mind. To 
be rightly apprehended, they require a reader 
in some degree familiar with all these subjects ; 
and how many of these are to be met with ? 
The man who takes an interest in his scienti- 
fic observations will seldom be transported by 
his pictures of scenery; the social observer, 
who extracts the rich collection of facts which 
he has accumulated regarding the people whom 
he visited, will be indifferent to his geographi- 
cal discoveries. There are few Humboldts 
either in the reading or thinking world. 

Chateaubriand is a traveller of a wholly 
different character. He lived entirely in anti- 
quity; but it is not the antiquity of Greece 
and Rome which has alone fixed his regards, 
as it has done those of Clarke and Eustace — it is 
the recollections of chivalry, the devout spirit 
of the pilgrim, which chiefly warmed his ar- 
dent imagination. He is universally allowed 
by Frenchmen of all parties to be their first 
writer; and it maybe conceived what brilliant 
works an author of such powers, and emi- 
nently gifted both with the soul of a poet and 
the eye of a painter, must have produced in 
describing the historic scenes to which his 
pilgrimages extended. He went to Greece and 
the Holy Land with a mind devout rather than 
enlightened, credulous rather than inquisitive. 
Thirsting for strong emotions, he would be 
satisfied; teeming with the recollections and 
visions of the past, he traversed the places 
hallowed by his early affections with the fond- 
ness of a lover who returns to the home of 
his bliss, of a mature man who revisits the 
scenes of his infancy. He cared not to inquire 



LAMARTINE. 



1G5 



what was true or what was legendary in these 
time-hallowed traditions ; he gladly accepted 
them as they stood, and studiously averted all 
inquiry into the foundation on which they 
rested. He wandered over the Peloponnesus 
or Judea with the fond ardour of an English 
scholar who seeks in the Palatine Mount the 
traces of Virgil's enchanting description of 
the hut of Evander, and rejects as sacrilege 
every attempt to shake his faith. 

" When Science from Creation's face 
Enchantment's visions draws. 
What lovely visions yield their place 
To cold material laws! " 

Even in the woods of America, the same rul- 
ing passion was evinced. In those pathless 
solitudes, where no human foot had ever trod 
but that of the wandering savage, and the 
majesty of nature appeared in undisturbed 
repose, his thoughts were still of the Old 
World. It was on the historic lands that his 
heart was set. A man himself, he dwelt on 
the scenes which had been signalized by the 
deeds, the sufferings, the glories of man. 

Michaud's mind is akin to that of Chateau- 
briand, and yet different in many important 
particulars. The learned and indefatigable 
historian of the Crusades, he has traversed 
the shores of the Mediterranean — the scene, 
as Dr. Johnson observed, of all that can ever 
interest man — his religion, his knowledge, his 
arts — with the ardent desire to imprint on his 
mind the scenes and images which met the 
eyes of the holy warriors. He seeks to trans- 
port us to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon and 
Raymond of Toulouse ; he thirsts with the 
Christian host at Dorislaus, he shares in its 
anxieties at the siege of Antioch, he partici- 
pates in its exultation at the storming of Jeru- 
salem. The scenes visited by the vast multi- 
tude of warriors who, during two hundred 
years, were precipitated from Europe on Asia, 
have almost all been visited by him, and de- 
scribed with the accuracy of an antiquary and 
the enthusiasm of a poet. With the old chro- 
nicles in his hand, he treads with veneration 
the scenes of former generous sacrifice and 
heroic achievements, and the vast and massy 
structures erected on either side during those 
terrible wars — when, for centuries, Europe 
strove hand to hand with Asia — most of which 
have undergone very little alteration, enable 
him to describe them almost exactly as they 
appeared to the holy warriors. The interest 
of his pilgrimage in the east, accordingly, is 
peculiar, but very great; it is not so much a 
book of travels as a moving chronicle; but, 
like Sir W. Scott's Minstrelsy of the Borders, it is 
a chronicle clothed in a very different garb from 
the homely dress of the olden time. It trans- 
ports us back, not only in time but in idea, six 
hundred years; but it does so with the grace 
of modern times — it clothes the profound feel- 
ings, the generous sacrifices, the forgetfulness 
of self of the twelfth century, with the poetic 
mind, the cultivated taste, the refined imagery 
of the nineteenth. 

Lamartine has traversed the same scenes 
w T ith Chateaubriand and Michaud, and yet he 
has done so in a different spirit; and the 
character of his work is essentially different 



from either. He has not the devout credulity 
of the first, nor the antiquarian zeal and know- 
ledge of the last; but he is superior to either 
in the description of nature, and the painting 
vivid and interesting scenes on the mind of 
the reader. His work is a moving panorama, 
in which the historic scenes and azure skies, 
and placid seas, and glowing sunsets, of the 
east, are portrayed in all their native bril- 
liancy, and in richer even than their native 
colours. His mind is stored with the associa- 
tions and the ideas of antiquity, and he has 
thrown over his descriptions of the scenes of 
Greece, or Holy Writ, all the charms of such 
recollections ; but he has done so in a more 
general and catholic spirit than either of his 
predecessors. He embarked for the Holy 
Land shortly before the revolution of 1830; 
and his thoughts, amidst all the associations 
of antiquity, constantly reverted to the land 
of his fathers — its distractions, its woes, its 
ceaseless turmoil, its gloomy social prospects. 
Thus with all his vivid imagination and unri- 
valled powers of description, the turn of his 
mind is essentially contemplative. He looks 
on the past as an emblem of the present; he 
sees, in the fall of Tyre, and Athens, and Jeru- 
salem, the fate which one day awaits his own 
country; and mourns less the decay of human 
things, than the popular passions and national 
sins which have brought that instability in 
close proximity to his own times. This sen- 
sitive and foreboding disposition w r as much 
increased by the death of his daughter — a 
charming child of fourteen, the companion of 
his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts, 
the darling of his affections — who was snatched 
away in the spring of life, when in health and 
joy, by one of the malignant fevers incidental 
to the pestilential plains of the east. 

Though Lamartine's travels are continuous, 
he does not, like most other wanderers, fur- 
nish us with a journal of every day's proceed- 
ings. He was too well aware that many, 
perhaps most, days on a journey are monoto- 
nous or uninteresting; and that great part 
of the details of a traveller's progress are 
wholly unworthy of being recorded, because 
they are neither amusing, elevating, nor in- 
structive. He paints, now and then, with all 
the force of his magical pencil, the more bril- 
liant or characteristic scenes which he visited, 
and intersperses them with reflections, moral 
and social ; such as would naturally be aroused 
in a sensitive mind by the sight of the ruins 
of ancient, and the contemplation of the decay 
of modern, times. 

He embarked at Marseilles, with Madame 
Lamartine and his little daughter Julia, on the 
10th of July, 1830. The following is the pic- 
ture of the yearnings of his mind on leaving 
his native land; and they convey a faithful 
image of his intellectual temperament: — 

'•I feel it deeply: I am one only of those 
men, without a distinctive character, of a 
transitory and fading epoch, whose sighs have 
found an echo — only because the echo was 
more poetical than the poet. I belong to 
another age by my desires: I feel- in myself 
another man: the immense and boundless 
horizon of philosophy, at once profound, re 



166 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



ligious, and poetical, has opened to my view; 
but the punishment of a wasted youth over- 
took me ; it soon faded from my sight. Adieu, 
then, to the dreams of genius, to the aspira- 
tions of intellectual enjoyment! It is too late: 
I have not physical strength to accomplish 
any thing great. I will sketch some scenes — 
I will murmur some strains; and that is all. 
Yet if God would grant my prayers, here is 
the object for which I would petition — a poem, 
such as my heart desires, and his greatness 
deserves! — a faithful, breathing image of his 
creation: of the boundless world, visible and 
invisible ! That would indeed be a worthy 
inheritance to leave to an era of darkness, of 
doubt, and of sadness! — an inheritance which 
would nourish the present age, and cause the 
next to spring with renovated youth." — (Voy- 
ages en Orient, I. 49, 50.)* 

One of his first nocturnal reveries at sea, 
portrays the tender and profoundly religious 
impressions of his mind: — 

"I walked for an hour on the deck of the 
vessel alone, and immeised alternately in sad 
or consoling reflection.',. I repeated in my 
heart all the prayers which I learned in in- 
fancy from my mother ; the verses, the frag- 
ments of the Psalms, which I had so often 
heard her repeat to herself, when walking in 
the evening in the garden of Milly. I experi- 
enced a melancholy pleasure in thus scatter- 
ing them, in my turn, to the waves, to the 
winds, to that Ear which is ever open to every 
real movement of the heart, though not yet 
uttered by the lips. The prayer which we 
have heard repeated by one we have loved, and 
who is no more, is doubly sacred. Who among 
us would not prefer a fewAvords of prayer taught 
us by our mother, to the most eloquent sup- 
plication composed by ourselves 7 Thence it 
is that whatever religious creed we may adopt 
at the age of reason, the Christian prayer will 
be ever the prayer of the human race. I prayed 
in the prayer of the church for the evening at 
sea ; also for that dear being, who never thought 
of danger to accompany her husband, and that 
lovely child, who played at the moment on the 
poop with the goat which was to give it milk 
on board, and with the little kids which licked 
her snow-white hands, and sported with her 
long and fair ringlets." — (I. 57.) 

A night-scene on the coast of Provence gives 
a specimen of his descriptive powers. 

" It was night — that is, what they call night 
in those climates; but how many days have I 
seen less brilliant on the banks of the" Thames, 
the Seine, the Saone, or the Lake of Geneva! 
A full moon shone in the firmament, and cast 
into the shade our vessel, which lay motion- 
less on the water at a little distance from the 
quay. The moon, in her progress through 
the heavens, had left a path marked as if with 
red sand, with which she had besprinkled the 
half of the sky: the remainder was clear deep 
blue, which melted into white as she advanced. 
On the horizon, at the distance of two miles, 
between two little isles, of which the one had 



* We lave translated a: the passages ourselves : the 
versions hitherto published in this country give, as most 
English translations of French works do, a most imper- 
fect idea of the original. 



headlands pointed and coloured like the Coli- 
seum at Rome, while the other was violet 
like the flower of the lilac, the image of a vast 
city appeared on the sea. It was an illusion, 
doubtless ; but it had all the appearance of 
reality. You saw clearly the domes glancing 
— dazzling lines of palaces — quays flooded by 
a soft and serene light ; on the right and the 
left the waves were seen to sparkle and en- 
close it on either side : it was Venice or Malta 
reposing in the midst of the waters. The 
illusion was produced by the reflection of the 
moon, when her rays fell perpendicularly on 
the waters ; nearer the eye, the radiance spread 
and expanded in a stream of gold and silver 
between two shores of azure. On the left, the 
gulf extended to the summit of a long and ob- 
scure range of serrated mountains; on the 
right opened a narrow and deep valley, where 
a fountain gushed forth beneath the shade of 
aged trees ; behind, rose a hill, clothed to the 
top with olives, which in the night appeared 
dark, from its summit to its base — a line of 
Gothic towers and white houses broke the ob- 
scurity of the wood, and drew the thoughts to 
the abodes, the joys, and the sufferings of man. 
Further off, in the extremity of the gulf, three 
enormous rocks rose, like pillars without base, 
from the surface of the waters — their forms 
were fantastic, their surface polished like flints 
by the action of the waves; but those flints 
were mountains — the remains, doubtless, of 
that primeval ocean which once overspread 
the earth, and of which our seas are but a 
feeble image."— (I. 66.) 

A rocky bay on the same romantic coast, 
now rendered accessible to travellers by the 
magnificent road of the Corniche, projected, 
and in part executed by Napoleon, furnishes 
another subject for this exquisite pencil : — 

" A mile to the eastward on the coast, the 
mountains, which there dip into the sea, are 
broken as if by the strokes of enormous clubs 
— huge fragments have fallen, and are strewed 
in wild confusion at the foot of the cliffs, or 
amidst the blue and green waves of the sea, 
which incessantly laves them. The waves 
break on these huge masses without inter- 
mission, with a hollow and alternating roar, 
or rise up in sheets of foam, which besprinkle 
their hoary fronts. These masses of moun- 
tains — for they are too large to be called rocks 
— are piled and heaped together in such num- 
bers, that they form an innumerable number 
of narrow havens, of profound caverns, of 
sounding grottoes, of gloomy fissures — of 
which the children of some of the neighbouring 
fishermen alone know the windings and the 
issues. One of these caverns, into which you 
enter by a natural arch, the summit of which 
is formed by an enormous block of granite, 
lets in the sea, through which it flows into a 
dark and narrow valley, which the waters fill 
entirely, with a surface as limpid and smooth 
as the firmament which they reflect. The sea 
preserves in this sequestered nook that beautiful 
tint of bright green, of which marine painters 
so strongly feel the value, but which they can 
never transfer exactly to their canvas; for 
the eye sees much which the hand strives in 
vain to imitate. 



LAMARTINE. 



167 



" On the two sides of that marine valley rise 
two prodigious walls of perpendicular rock, 
of an uniform and sombre hue, similar to that 
of iron ore, after it has issued and cooled from 
the furnace. Not a plant, not a moss can find 
a slope or a crevice wherein to insert its roots 
or cover the rocks with those waving garlands 
which so often in Savoy clothe the cliffs, where 
they flower to God alone. Black, naked, per- 
pendicular, repelling the eye by their awful 
aspect — they seem to have been placed there 
for no other purpose but to protect from the 
sea-breezes the hills of olives and vines, which 
bloom under their shelter; an image of those 
ruling men in a stormy epoch, who seem placed 
by Providence to bear the fury of all the tem- 
pests of passion and of time, to screen the 
weaker but happier race of mortals. At the 
bottom of the bay the sea expands a little, as- 
sumes a bluer tint as it comes to reflect more 
of the cloudless heavens, and at length its tiny 
waves die away on a bed of violets, as closely 
netted together as the sand upon the shore. If 
you disembark from the boat, you find in the 
cleft of a neighbouring ravine a fountain of 
living water, which gushes beneath a narrow 
path formed by the goats, which leads up from 
this sequestered solitude, amidst overshadow- 
ing fig-trees and oleanders, to the cultivated 
abodes of man. Few scenes struck me so 
much in my long wanderings. Its charm con- 
sists in that exquisite union of force and grace 
which forms the perfection of natural beauty 
as of the highest class of intellectual beings; 
it is that mysterious hymen of the land and 
the sea, surprised, as it were, in their most 
secret and hidden union. It is the image of 
perfect calm and inaccessible solitude, close 
to the theatre of tumultuous tempests, where 
their near roar is heard with such terror, where 
their foaming but lessened waves yet break 
upon the shore. It is one of those numer- 
ous chefs-d'ceuvre of creation which God has 
scattered over the earth, as if to sport with 
contrasts, but which he conceals so frequently 
on the summit of naked rocks, in the depth of 
inaccessible ravines, on the unapproachable 
shores of the ocean, like jewels which he 
unveils rarely, and that only to simple be- 
ings, to children, to shepherds or fishermen, 
or the devout worshippers of nature." — (I. 73 
—74.) 

This style of description of scenery is 
peculiar to this age, and in it Lamartine may 
safely be pronounced without a rival in the 
whole range of literature. It was with Scott 
and Chateaubriand that the graphic style of 
description arose in England and France; but 
he has pushed the art further than either of 
his great predecessors. Milton and Thomson 
had long ago, indeed, in poetry, painted nature 
in the most enchanting, as well as the truest 
colours ; but in prose little was to be found 
except a general and vague description of a 
class of objects, as lakes, mountains, and 
rivers, without any specification of features 
and details, so as to convey a definite and dis- 
tinct impression to the mind of the reader. 
Even the classical mind and refined taste of 
Addison could not attain this graphic style ; his 
descriptions of scenery, like that of all prose 



writers down to the close of the eighteenth 
century, are lost in vague generalities. Like 
almost all descriptions of battles in modern 
times, before Napier, they are so like each 
other that you cannot distinguish one from the 
other. Scott and Chateaubriand, when they 
did apply their great powers to the delineation 
of nature, were incomparably faithful, as well 
as powerfully imaginative; but such descrip- 
tions were, for the most part, but a secondary 
object with them. The human heart was their 
great study ; the vicissitudes of life, the inex- 
haustible theme of their genius. With La- 
martine, again, the description of nature is the 
primary object. It is to convey a vivid im- 
pression of the scenes he has visited that he 
has written ; to kindle in his reader's mind the 
train of emotion and association which their 
contemplation awakened in his own, that he 
has exerted all his powers. He is much more 
laboured and minute, in consequence, than 
either of his predecessors ; he records the 
tints, the forms, the lights, the transient effects 
with all a painter's enthusiasm and all a poet's 
power ; and succeeds, in any mind at all fa- 
miliar with the objects of nature, in conjuring 
up images as vivid, sometimes perhaps more 
beautiful, than the originals which he por- 
trayed. 

From the greatness of his powers, however, 
in this respect, and the facility with which he 
commits to paper the whole features of the 
splendid phantasmagoria with which his me- 
mory is stored, arises the principal defect of 
his work; and the circumstance which has 
hitherto prevented it, in this country at least, 
from acquiring general popularity commen- 
surate to its transcendent merits. He is too 
rich in glowing images; his descriptions are 
redundant in number and beauty. The mind 
even of the most imaginative reader is fatigued 
by the constant drain upon its admiration — 
the fancy is exhausted in the perpetual effort to 
conceive the scenes which he portrays to the 
eye. Images of beauty enough are to be found 
in his four volumes of Travels in the East, to 
emblazon, with the brightest colours of the 
rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure. 
We long for some repose amidst the constant 
repetition of dazzling objects ; monotony, in- 
sipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself, 
would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless 
flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott 
says, in one of his novels — " Be assured that 
whenever I am particularly dull, it is not with- 
out an object;" and Lamartine would some- 
times be the better of following the advice. 
We generally close one of his volumes with 
the feeling so well known to travellers in the 
Italian cities, "I hope to God there is nothing 
more to be seen here." And having given the 
necessary respite of unexciting disquisition to 
rest our readers' minds, we shall again bring 
forward one of his glowing pictures : — 

"Between the sea and the last heights of 
Lebanon, which sink rapidly almost to the 
water's edge, extends a plain eight leagues in 
length by one or two broad ; sandy, bare, 
covered only with thorny arbutus, browsed by 
the camels of caravans. From it darts out into 
the sea an advanced peninsula, linked to the 



168 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



continent only by a narrow chaussee of shining 
sand, borne hither by the winds of Egypt. 
Tyre, now called Sour by the Arabs, is situated 
at the extremity of this peninsula, and seems, 
at a distance, to rise out of the waves. The 
modern town, at first sight, has a gay and 
smiling appearance; but a nearer approach 
dispels the illusion, and exhibits only a few 
hundred crumbling and half-deserted houses, 
where the Arabs, in the evening, assemble to 
shelter their flocks which have browsed in the 
narrow plain. Such is all that now remains 
of the mighty Tyre. It has neither a harbour to 
the sea, nor a road to the land ; the prophecies 
have long been accomplished in regard to it. 

" We moved on in silence, buried in the 
contemplation of the dust of an empire which 
we trod. We followed a path in the middle 
of the plain of Tyre, between the town and the 
hills of gray and naked rock which Lebanon 
has thrown down towards the sea. We arrived 
abreast of the city, and touched a mound of 
sand which appears the sole remaining ram- 
part to prevent it from being overwhelmed by 
the waves of the ocean or the desert. I thought 
of the prophecies, and called to mind some of 
the eloquent denunciations of Ezekiel. As I 
was making these reflections, some objects, 
black, gigantic, and motionless, appeared upon 
the summit of one of the overhanging cliffs of 
Lebanon which there advanced far into the 
plain. They resembled five black statues, 
placed on a rock as their huge pedestal. At 
first we thought it was five Bedouins, who 
were there stationed to fire upon us from their 
inaccessible heights ; but when we were at the 
distance of fifty yards, we beheld one of them 
open its enormous wings, and^ flap them 
against its sides with a sound like the unfurl- 
ing of a sail. We then perceived that they 
were five eagles of the largest species I have 
ever seen, either in the Alps or our museums. 
They made no attempt to move when we ap- 
proached ; they seemed to regard themselves 
as kings of the desert, looked on Tyre as an 
appanage which belonged to them, and whither 
they were about to return. Nothing more 
supernatural ever met my eyes ; I could almost 
suppose that behind them I saw the terrible 
figure of Ezekiel, the poet of vengeance, point- 
ing to the devoted city which the divine wrath 
had overwhelmed with destruction. The dis- 
charge of a few muskets made them rise from 
their rock: but they showed no disposition to 
move from their ominous perch, and, soon 
returning, floated over our heads, regardless 
of the shots fired at them, as if the eagles of 
God were beyond the reach of human injury." 
—(II. 8—9.) 

Jerusalem was a subject to awaken all our 
author's enthusiasm, and call forth all his 
descriptive powers. The first approach to it 
has exercised the talents of many writers in 
prose and verse ; but none has drawn it in 
such graphic and brilliant colours as our 
author: — 

" We ascended a mountain ridge strewed 
over with enormous gray rocks piled one on 
another as if by human hands. Here and 
there a few stunted vines, 3 r ellow with the co- 
lour of autumn, crept along the soil in, a few 



places cleared out in the wilderness. Fig- 
trees, with their tops withered or shivered by 
the blasts, often edged the vines, and cast their 
black fruit on the gray rock. On our right, 
the desert of St. John, where formerly ' the 
voice was heard crying in the wilderness,' 
sank like an abyss in the midst of five or six 
black mountains, through the openings of 
which, the sea of Egypt, overspread with a 
dark cloud, could still be discerned. On the 
left, and near the eye, was an old tower, placed 
on the top of a projecting eminence ; other 
ruins, apparently of an ancient aqueduct, de- 
scended from that tower, overgrown with ver- 
dure, now in the sere leaf; that tower is 
Modin, the stronghold and tomb of the last 
heroes of sacred story, the Maccabees. We 
left behind us the ruins, resplendent with the 
first rays of the morning — rays, not blended as 
in Europe in a confused and vague illumi- 
nation, but darting like arrows of fire tinted 
with various colours, issuing from a dazzling 
centre, and diverging over the whole heavens 
as they expand. Some were of blue, slightly 
silvered, others of pure white, some of tender 
rose-hue, melting into gray; many of burning 
fire, like the coruscations of a flaming confla- 
gration. All were distinct, yet all united in 
one harmonious whole, forming a resplendent 
arch in the heavens, encircling, and issuing 
from a centre of fire. In proportion as the 
day advanced, the brilliant light of these sepa- 
rate rays was gradually dimmed — or rather, 
they were blended together, and composed the 
colourless light of day. Then the moon, which 
still shone overhead, ' paled her ineffectual 
fire,' and melted away in the general illumina- 
tion of the heavens. 

" After having ascended a second ridge, 
more lofty and naked than the former, the 
horizon suddenly opens to the right, and pre- 
sents a view of all the country which extends 
between the last summits of Judea and the 
mountains of Arabia. It was already flooded 
with the increasing light of the morning; but 
beyond the piles of gray rock which lay in the 
foreground, nothing was distinctly visible but 
a dazzling space, like a vast sea, interspersed 
with a few islands of shade, which stood forth 
in the brilliant surface. On the shores of that 
imaginary ocean, a little to the left, and about 
a league distant, the sun shone with uncom- 
mon brilliancy on a massy tower, a lofty min- 
aret, and some edifices, which crowned the 
summit of a low hill of which you could not 
see the bottom. Soon the points of other mi- 
narets, a few loopholed walls, and the dark 
summits of several domes, which successively 
came into view, and fringed the descending 
slope of the hill, announced a city. It was 
Jeiiusalem, and every one of the party, with- 
out addressing a word to the guides or to each 
other, enjoyed in silence the entrancing spec- 
tacle. We rested our horses to contemplate 
that mysterious and dazzling apparition ; but 
when we moved on, it was soon snatched from 
our view ; for as we descended the hill, and 
plunged into the deep and profound valley 
which lay at its feet, we lost sight of the hoi/ 
city, and were surrounded only by the solitude 
and desolation of the desert." — (II. 163 — 165.) 



LAMARTINE. 



169 



The environs of Jerusalem are described 
with equal force by the same master-hand : — 

" The general aspect of the environs of Je- 
rusalem may be described in a few words. 
Mountains without shade, and valleys without 
water — the earth without verdure, rocks with- 
out grandeur. Here and there a few blocks 
of gray stone start up out of the dry and fis- 
sured earth, between which, beneath the shade 
of an old fig-tree, a gazelle or a hyoena are oc- 
casionally seen to emerge from the fissures 
of the rock. A few plants or vines creep over 
the surface of that gray and parched soil ; in 
the distance, is occasionally seen a grove of 
olive-trees, casting a shade over the arid side 
of the mountain — the mouldering walls and 
towers of the city appearing from afar on the 
summit of Mount Sion. Such is the. general 
character of the country. The sky is ever 
pure, bright, and cloudless; never does even 
the slightest film of mist obscure the purple 
tint of evening and morning. On the side of 
Arabia, a wide gulf opens amidst the black 
ridges, and presents a vista of the shining sur- 
face of the Dead Sea, and the violet summits 
of the mountains of Moab. Rarely is a breath 
of air heard to murmur, in the fissures of the 
rocks, or among the branches of the aged 
olives ; not a bird sings, nor an insect chirps 
in the waterless furrows. Silence reigns uni- 
versally, in the city, in the roads, in the fields. 
Such was Jerusalem during all the time that 
we spent within its walls. Not a sound ever 
met our ears, but the neighing of the horses, 
who grew impatient under the burning rays of 
the sun, or who furrowed the earth with their 
feet, as they stood picketed round our camp, 
mingled occasionally with the crying of the 
hour from the minarets, or the mournful ca- 
dences of the Turks as they accompanied the 
dead to their cemeteries. Jerusalem, to which 
the world hastens to visit a sepulchre, is itself 
a vast tomb of a people; but it is a tomb with- 
out cypresses, without inscriptions, without 
monuments, of which they have broken the 
gravestones, and the ashes of which appear to 
cover the earth which surrounds it with mourn- 
ing, silence and sterility. We cast our eyes 
back frequently from the top of every hill 
which we passed on this mournful and deso- 
late region, and at length we saw for the last 
time, the crown of olives which surmounts the 
Mount of the same name, and which long rises 
above the horizon after you have lost sight of 
the town itself. At length it also sank beneath 
the rocky screen, and disappeared like the 
chaplets of flowers which we throw on a se- 
pulchre."— (II. 275—276.) 

From Jerusalem he made an expedition to 
Balbec in the desert, which produced the same 
impression upon him that it does upon all 
other travellers : — 

" We rose with the sun, the first rays of 
which struck on the temples of Balbec, and 
gave to those mysterious ruins that eclat which 
his brilliant light throws ever over ruins 
which it illuminates. Soon we arrived, on the 
northern side, at the foot of the gigantic walls 
which surround those beautiful remains. A 
clear stream, flowing over a bed of granite, 
murmured around the enormous blocks of 
22 



stone, fallen from the top of the wall which 
obstructed its course. Beautiful sculptures 
were half concealed in the limpid stream. 
We passed the rivulet by an arch formed by 
these fallen remains, and mounting a narrow 
breach, were soon lost in admiration of the 
scene which surrounded us. At every step a 
fresh exclamation of surprise broke from our 
lips. Every one of the stones of which that 
wall was composed was from eight to ten feet 
in length, by five or six in breadth, and as 
much in height. They rest, without cement, 
one upon the other, and almost all bear the 
mark of Indian or Egyptian sculpture. At a 
single glance, you see that these enormous 
stones are not placed in their original site — 
that they are the precious remains of temples 
of still more remote antiquity, which were 
made use of to encircle this colony of Grecian 
and Roman citizens. 

" When we reached the summit of the 
breach, our eyes knew not to what object first 
to turn. On all sides were gates of marble of 
prodigious height and magnitude ; windows or 
niches, fringed with the richest friezes; fallen 
pieces of cornices, of entablatures, or capitals, 
thick as the dust beneath our feet ; magnificent 
vaulted roofs above our heads; everywhere a 
chaos of confused beauty, the remains of 
which lay scattered about, or piled on each 
other in endless variety. So prodigious was 
the accumulation of architectural remains, 
that it defies all attempts at classification, or 
conjecture of the kind of buildings to which 
the greater part of them had belonged. After 
passing through this scene of ruined magnifi- 
cence, we reached an inner wall, which we 
also ascended; and from its summit the view 
of the interior was yet more splendid. Of 
much greater extent, far more richly decorated 
than the outer circle, it presented an immense 
platform in the form of a long rectangle, the 
level surface of which was frequently broken 
by the remains of still more elevated pave- 
ments, on which temples to the sun, the object 
of adoration at Balbec, had been erected. All 
around that platform were a series of lesser 
temples — or chapels, as we should call them — 
decorated with niches, admirably engraved, 
and loaded with sculptured ornaments to a de- 
gree that appeared excessive to those who had 
seen the severe simplicity of the Parthenon or 
the Coliseum. But how prodigious the accu- 
mulation of architectural riches in the middle 
of an eastern desert ! Combine in imagination 
the Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Coliseum 
at Rome, of Jupiter Olympius and the Acropo- 
lis at Athens, and you will yet fall short of that 
marvellous assemblage of admirable edifices 
and sculptures. Many of the temples rest on 
columns seventy feet in height, and seven feet 
in diameter, yet composed only of two or three 
blocks of stone, so perfectly joined together 
that to this day you can barely discern the 
lines of their junction. Silence is the only 
language which befits man when words are 
inadequate to convey his impressions. We 
remained mute with admiration, gazing on the 
eternal ruins. 

"The shades of night overtook us while we 
yet rested in amazement at the scene by which 



170 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



we were surrounded. One by one they enve- 
loped the columns in their obscurity, and added 
a mystery the more to that magical and mys- 
terious work of time and man. We appeared, 
as compared with the gigantic mass and long 
duration of these monuments, as the swallows 
which nestle a season in the crevices of the 
capitals, without knowing by whom, or for 
whom, they have been constructed. The 
thoughts, the wishes, which moved these 
masses, are to us unknown. The dust of marble 
which we tread beneath our feet knows more 
of it than we do, but it cannot tell us what it 
has seen ; and in a few ages the generations 
which shall come in their turn to visit our 
monuments, will ask, in like manner, wherefore 
we have built and engraved. The works of 
man survive his thought. Movement is the 
law of the human mind ; the definite is the 
dream of his pride and his ignorance. God is 
a limit which appears ever to recede as hu- 
manity approaches him; we are ever advanc- 
ing, and never arrive. This great Divine Fi- 
gure which man from his infancy is ever striv- 
ing to reach, and to imprison in his structures 
raised by hands, for ever enlarges and ex- 
pands; it outsteps the narrow limits of tem- 
ples, and leaves the altars to crumble into 
dust; and calls man to seek for it where alone 
it resides — in thought, in intelligence, in vir- 
tue, in nature, in infinity." — (II. 39,46, 47.) 

This passage conveys an idea of the peculiar 
style, and perhaps unique charm, of Lamar- 
tine's work. It is the mixture of vivid paint- 
ing with moral reflection — of nature with sen- 
timent — of sensibility to beauty, with gratitude 
to its Author, which constitutes its great attrac- 
tion. Considering in what spirit the French 
Revolution was cradled, and from what infide- 
lity it arose, it is consoling to see such senti- 
ments conceived and published among them. 
True they are not the sentiments of the major- 
ity, at least in towns; but what then? The 
majority is ever guided by the thoughts of the 
great, not in its own but a preceding age. It 
is the opinions of the great among our grand- 
fathers that govern the majority at this time ; 
our great men will guide our grandsons. If 
we would foresee what a future age is to 
think, we must observe Avhat a few great men 
are now thinking. Voltaire and Rousseau 
have ruled France for two generations; the 
day of Chateaubriand and Guizot and Lamar- 
tine will come in due time. 

But the extraordinary magnitude of these 
ruins in the middle of an Asiatic wilderness, 
suggests another consideration. We are per- 
petually speaking of the march of intellect, the 
vast spread of intelligence, the advancing civi- 
lization of the world ; and in some respect our 
boasts are well founded. Certainly, in one 
particular, society has made a mighty step in 
advance. The abolition of domestic slavery 
has emancipated the millions who formerly 
toiled in bondage ; the art of printing has mul- 
tiplied an hundred fold the reading and think- 
ing world. Our opportunities, therefore, have 
been prodigiously enlarged ; our means of ele- 
vation are tenfold what they were in ancient 
times. But has our elevation itself kept pace 
with these enlarged means 1 Has the in- 



creased direction of the popular mind to lofty 
and spiritual objects, the more complete subju- 
gation of sense, the enlarged perception of the 
useful and the beautiful, been in proportion 
to the extended facilities given to the great 
body of the people ? Alas ! the fact is just the 
reverse. Balbec was a mere station in the 
desert, without territory, harbour, or subjects 
— maintained solely by the commerce of the 
East with Europe which flowed through its 
walls. Yet Balbec raised, in less than a cen- 
tury, a more glorious pile of structures de- 
voted to religious and lofty objects, than Lon- 
don, Paris, and St. Petersburg united can now 
boast. The Decapolis was a small and remote 
mountain district of Palestine, not larger in 
proportion to the Roman, than Morayshire is 
in proportion to the British empire ; yet it 
contained, as its name indicates, and as their 
remains still attest, ten cities, the least consi- 
derable of which, Gebora, contains, as Buck- 
ingham tells us in his Travel* beyond the Jordan, 
the ruins of more sumptuous edifices than any 
city in the British islands, London itself not ex- 
cepted, can now boast. It was the same all over 
the east, and in all the southern provinces of the 
Roman empire. Whence has arisen this asto- 
nishing disproportion between the great things 
done by the citizens in ancient and in modern 
times, when in the latter the means of enlarged 
cultivation have been so immeasurably extend- 
ed ? It is in vain to say, it is because we have 
more social and domestic happiness, and our 
wealth is devoted to these objects, not external 
embellishment. Social and domestic happiness 
are in the direct, not in the inverse ratio of gene- 
ral refinement and the spread of intellectual 
intelligence. The domestic duties are better 
nourished in the temple than in the gin-shop ; 
the admirers of sculpture will make better 
fathers and husbands than the lovers of whisky. 
Is it that we want funds for such undertakings 1 
Why, London is richer than ever Rome was ; 
the commerce of the world, not of the eastern 
caravans, flows through its bosom. The sums 
annually squandered in Manchester and Glas- 
gow on intoxicating liquors, would soon make 
them rival the eternal structures of Tadmor 
and Palmyra. Is it that the great bulk of our 
people are unavoidably chained by their cha- 
racter and climate to gross and degrading en- 
joyments 1 Is it that the spreading of know- 
ledge, intelligence, and free institutions, only 
confirms the sway of sensual gratification ; and 
that a pure and spiritual religion tends only 
to strengthen the fetters of passion and self- 
ishness 1 Is it that the inherent depravity of 
the human heart appears the more clearly as 
man is emancipated from the fetters of autho- 
rity : must we go back to early ages for noble 
and elevated motives of action ; is the spread 
of freedom but another word for the extension 
of brutality? God forbid that so melancholy 
a doctrine should have any foundation in hu- 
man nature ! We mention the facts, and leave 
it to future ages to discover their solution : 
contenting ourselves with pointing out to our 
self-applauding countrymen how much they 
have to do before they attain the level of their 
advantages, or justify the boundless blessings 
which Providence has bestowed upon them. 



LAMARTINE. 



171 



The plain of Troy, seen by moonlight, fur- 
nishes the subject of one of our author's most 
striking passages. 

"It is midnight: the sea is calm as a mir- 
ror; the vessel floats motionless on the re- 
splendent surface. On our left, Tenedos rises 
above the waves, and shuts out the view of the 
open sea; on our right, and close to us, stretched 
out like a dark bar, the low shore and indented 
coasts of Tkot. The full moon, which rises 
behind the snow-streaked summit of Mount 
Ida, sheds a serene and doubtful light over the 
summits of the mountains, the hills, the plain; 
its extending rays fall upon the sea, and reach 
the shadow of our brig, forming a bright path 
which the shades do not venture to approach. 
We can discern the tumuli, which tradition still 
marks as the tombs of Hector and Patroclus. 
The full moon, slightly tinged with red, which 
discloses the undulations of the hills, resembles 
the bloody buckler of Achilles ; no light is to 
be seen on the coast, but a distant twinkling, 
lighted by the shepherds on Mount Ida — not a 
sound is to be heard but the flapping of the 
sail on the mast, and the slight creaking of the 
mast itself; all seems dead, like the past, in 
that deserted land. Seated on the forecastle, 
I see that shore, those mountains, those ruins, 
those tombs, rise like the ghost of the departed 
world, reappear from the bosom of the sea with 
shadowy form, by the rays of the star of night, 
which sleep on the hills, and disappear as the 
moon recedes behind the summits of the moun- 
tains. It is a beautiful additional page in the 
poems of Homer, the end of all history and of 
all poetry! Unknown tombs, ruins without 
a certain name; the earth naked and dark, but 
imperfectly lighted by the immortal luminaries; 
new spectators passing by the old coast, and 
repeating for the thousandth time the common 
epitaph of mortality! Here lies an empire, 
here a town, here a people, here a hero ! God 
alone is great, and the thought which seeks 
and adores him alone is imperishable upon 
earth. I feel no desire to make a nearer ap- 
proach in daylight to the doubtful remains of 
the ruins of Troy. I prefer that nocturnal ap- 
parition which allows the thought to repeople 
those deserts, and sheds over them only the dis- 
tant light of the moon and of the poetry of Homer. 
And what concerns me Troy, its heroes, and its 
gods ! That leaf of the heroic world is turned 
for ever !"— (II. 248—250.) 

What a magnificent testimonial to the genius 
of Homer, written in a foreign tongue, two 
thousand seven hundred years after his death ! 
The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus have, 
from the dawn of letters, exercised the descrip- 
tive talents of the greatest historians of modern 
Europe. The truthful chronicle of Villehar- 
douin, and the eloquent pictures of Gibbon and 
Sismondi of the siege of Constantinople, will 
immediately occur to every scholar. The fol- 
lowing passage, however, will show that no 
subject can be worn out when it is handled by 
the pen of genius: 

" It was five in the morning, I was standing 
on deck; we made sail towards the mouth of 
the Bosphorus, skirting the walls of Constan- 
tinople. After half an hour's navigation 
through ships at anchor, we touched the walls 



of the seraglio, which prolongs those of the city, 
and form at the extremity of the hill which sup- 
ports the proud Stamboul, the angle which 
separates the sea of Marmora from the canal 
of the Bosphorus, and the harbour of the Gold- 
en Horn. It is there that God and man, na- 
ture and art, have combined to form the most 
marvellous spectacle which the human eye 
can behold. I uttered an involuntary cry when 
the magnificent panorama opened upon my 
sight; I forgot for ever the bay of Naples and 
all its enchantments ; to compare any thing to 
that marvellous and graceful combination would 
be an injury to the fairest work of creation. 

" The walls which support the circular ter- 
races of the immense gardens of the seraglio 
were on our left, with their base perpetually 
washed by the waters of the Bosphorus, blue 
and limpid as the Rhone at Geneva; the ter- 
races which rise one above another to the pa- 
lace of the sultana, the gilded cupolas of which 
rose above the gigantic summits of the plane- 
tree and the cypress, were themselves clothed 
with enormous trees, the trunks of which over- 
hang the walls, while their branches, over- 
spreading the gardens, spread a deep shadow 
even far°into the sea, beneath the protection 
of which the panting rowers repose from their 
toil. These stately groups of trees are from 
time to time interrupted by palaces, pavilions, 
kiosks, gilded and sculptured domes, or bat- 
teries of cannon. These maritime palaces form 
part of the seraglio. You see occasionally 
through the muslin curtains the gilded roofs 
and sumptuous cornices of those abodes of 
beauty. At every step, elegant Moorish foun- 
tains fall from the higher parts of the gardens, 
and murmur in marble basins, from whence, 
before reaching the sea, they are conducted in 
little cascades to refresh the passengers. As 
the vessel coasted the walls, the prospect ex- 
panded—the coast of Asia appeared, and the 
mouth of the Bosphorus, properly so called, 
began to open between hills, on one side of 
dark green, on the other of smiling verdure, 
which seemed variegated by all the colours of 
the rainbow. The smiling shores of Asia, dis- 
tant about a mile, stretched out to our right, 
surmounted by lofty hills, sharp at the top, and 
clothed to the summit with dark forests, with 
their sides varied by hedge-rows, villas, or- 
chards, and gardens. Deep precipitous ravines 
occasionally descended on this side into the sea, 
overshadowed by huge overgrown oaks, the 
branches of which dipped into the water. Fur- 
ther on still, on the Asiatic side, an advanced 
headland projected into the waves, covered 
with white houses — it was Scutari, with its 
vast white barracks, its resplendent mosques, 
its animated quays, forming a vast city. Fur- 
ther still, the Bosphorus, like a deeply imbed- 
ded river, opened between opposing moun- 
tains—the advancing promontories and re- 
ceding bays of which, clothed to the water's 
edge with "forests, exhibited a confused assem- 
blage of masts of vessels, shady groves, noble 
palaces, hanging gardens, and tranquil ha- 
vens. 

"The harbour of Constantinople is not, pro- 
perly speaking, a port. It is rather a great 
river like the Thames, shut in on either side 



172 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



by hills covered with houses, and covered by 
innumerable lines of ships lying at anchor 
along the quays. Vessels of every description 
are to be seen there, from the Arabian bark, 
the prow of which is raised, and darts along 
like the ancient galleys, to the ship of the line, 
with three decks, and its sides studded with 
brazen mouths. Multitudes of Turkish barks 
circulate through that forest of masts, serving 
the purpose of carriages in that maritime city, 
and disturb, in their swift progress through the 
waves, clouds of albatros, which, like beau- 
tiful white pigeons, rise from the sea on their 
approach, to descend and repose again on the 
unruffled surface. It is impossible to count the 
vessels which lie on the water from the Se- 
raglio point to the suburb of Eyoub and the 
delicious valley of the Sweet Waters. The 
Thames at London exhibits nothing compara- 
ble to it."— (II. 262—265.) 

"Beautiful as the European side of the 
Bosphorus is, the Asiatic is infinitely more 
striking. It owes nothing to man, but every 
thing to nature. There is neither a Buyukdere 
nor a Therapia; nor palaces of ambassadors, 
nor an Armenian nor Frank city; there is no- 
thing but mountains with glens which separate 
them ; little valleys enamelled with green, 
which lie at the foot of the overhanging rocks ; 
torrents which enliven the scene with their 
foam ; forests which darken it by their shade, 
or dip their boughs in the waves ; a variety of 
forms, of tints, and of foliage, which the pen- 
cil of the painter is alike unable to represent 
or the pen of the poet to describe. A few 
cottages perched on the summit of projecting 
rocks, or sheltered in the bosom of a deeply 
indented bay, alone tell you of the presence 
of man. The evergreen oaks hang in such 
masses over the waves that the boatmen glide 
under their branches, and often sleep cradled 
in their arms. Such is the character of the 
coast on the Asiatic side as far as the castle 
of Mahomet II., which seems to shut it in as 
closely as any Swiss lake. Beyond that, the 
character changes ; the hills are less rugged, 
and descend in gentler slopes to the water's 
edge; charming little plains, checkered with 
fruit-trees and shaded by planes, frequently 
open ; and the delicious Sweet Waters of Asia 
exhibit a scene of enchantment equal to any 
described in the Arabian Nights. Women, 
children, and black slaves in every variety of 
costume and colour; veiled ladies from Con- 
stantinople ; cattle and buffaloes ruminating in 
the pastures ; Arab horses clothed in the most 
sumptuous trappings of velvet and gold; 
caiques filled with Armenian and Circassian 
young women, seated under the shade or play- 
ing with their children, some of the most 
ravishing beauty, form a scene of variety and 
interest probably unique in the world."— (III. 
331,332.) 

These are the details of the piece : here is 
the general impression : — 

"One evening, by the light of a splendid 
moon, which was reflected from the sea of 
Marmora, and the violet summits of Mount 
Olympus, I sat alone under the cypresses of 
the < Ladders of the Dead;' those cypresses 
which overshadow innumerable tombs of 



Mussulmen, and descend from the heights of 
Pera to the shores of the sea. No one ever 
passes at that hour: you would suppose your- 
self an hundred miles from the capital, if a 
confused hum, wafted by the wind, was not 
occasionally heard, which speedily died away 
among the branches of the cypress. These 
sounds weakened by distance; — the songs of 
the sailors in the vessels ; the stroke of the 
oars in the water; the drums of the military 
bands in the barracks ; the songs of the women 
■who lulled their children to sleep ; the cries of 
the Muetzlim who, from the summits of the 
minarets, called the faithful to evening prayers; 
the evening gun which boomed across the 
Bosphorus, the signal of repose to the fleet- 
all .these sounds combined to form one con- 
fused murmur, which strangely contrasted 
with the perfect silence around me, and pro- 
duced the deepest impression. The seraglio, 
with its vast peninsula, dark with plane-trees 
and cypresses, stood forth like a promontory 
of forests between the two seas which slept 
beneath my eyes. The moon shone on the nu- 
merous kiosks; and the old walls of the palace 
of Amurath stood forth like huge rocks from 
the obscure gloom of the plane-trees. Before 
me was the scene, in my mind was the recol- 
lection, of all the glorious and sinister events 
which had there taken place. The impression 
was the strongest, the most overwhelming, 
which a sensitive mind could receive. All 
was there mingled — man and God, society and 
nature, mental agitation, the melancholy repose 
of thought. I know not whether I participated 
in the great movement of associated beings 
who enjoy or suffer in that mighty assemblage, 
or in that nocturnal slumber of the elements, 
which murmured thus, and raised the mind 
above the cares of cities and empires into the 
bosom of nature and of God." — (III. 283, 284.) 
"II faut du terns," says Voltaire, "pourque 
les grandes reputations murissent." As a de- 
scriber of nature, we place Lamartine at the 
head of all writers, ancient or modern — above 
Scott or Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael or 
Humboldt. He aims at a different object from 
any of these great writers. He does not, like 
them, describe the emotion produced on the 
mind by the contemplation of natitre; he 
paints the objects in the scene itself, their 
colours and traits, their forms and substance, 
their lights and shadows. A painter following 
exactly what he portrays, would make a glo- 
rious gallery of landscapes. He is, moreover, 
a charming poet, an eloquent debater, and has 
written many able and important works on 
politics, yet we never recollect, during the last 
twenty years, to have heard his name men- 
tioned in English society except once, when 
an old and caustic, but most able judge, now 
no more, said, " I have been reading Lamar- 
tine's Travels in the East — it seems a perfect 
rhapsody." 

We must not suppose, however, from this, 
that the English nation is incapable of appre- 
ciating the highest degree of eminence in the 
fine arts, or that we are never destined to rise 
to excellence in any but the mechanical. It is 
the multitude of subordinate writers of mode- 
rate merit who obstruct all the avenues to 



THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION. 



173 



great distinction, which really occasions the 
phenomenon. Strange as it may appear, it is 
a fact abundantly proved by literary history, 
and which may be verified by every day's ex- 
perience, that men are in general insensible to 
the highest class of intellectual merit when it 
first appears, and that it is by slow degrees 
and the opinion oft repeated, of the really su- 
perior in successive generations, that it is at 
length raised to its deserved and lasting pedes- 
tal. There are instances to the contrary, such 
as Scott and Byron : but they are the excep- 
tion, not the rule. We seldom do justice but 



to the dead. Contemporary jealousy, literary 
envy, general timidity, the dread of ridicule, the 
confusion of rival works, form so many obsta- 
cles to the speedy acquisition of a great living 
reputation. To the illustrious of past ages, 
however, we pay a universal and willing 
homage. Contemporary genius appears with 
a twinkling and uncertain glow, like the shift- 
ing and confused lights of a great city seen at 
night from a distance : while the spirits of the 
dead shine with an imperishable lustre, far re- 
moved in the upper firmament from the dis- 
tractions of the rivalry of a lower world. 



THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION/ 



Whoever has contemplated of late years the 
state of British literature, and compared it with 
the works of other countries who have preceded 
England in the career of arts or of arms, must 
have become sensible that some very power- 
ful cause has, for a long period, been at work 
in producing the ephemeral character by which 
it is at present distinguished. It is a matter 
of common complaint, that every thing is now 
sacrificed to the desires or the gratification of 
the moment ; that philosophy, descending from 
its high station as the instructor of men, has 
degenerated into the mere handmaid of art; 
that literature is devoted rather to afford amuse- 
ment for a passing hour, than furnish improve- 
ment to a long life ; and that poetry itself has 
become rather the reflection of the fleeting 
fervour of the public mind, than the well from 
which noble and elevated sentiments are to be 
derived. We have only to take up the columns 
of a newspaper, to see how varied and endless 
are the efforts made to amuse the public, and 
how few the attempts to instruct or improve 
them; and if we examine the books which lie 
upon every drawing-room table, or the cata- 
logues which show the purchases that have 
been made by any of the numerous book-clubs 
or circulating libraries which have sprung up 
in the country, we shall feel no surprise at the 
ephemeral nature of the literature which 
abounds, from the evidence there afforded of 
the transitory character of the public wishes 
which require to be gratified. 

It is not to be supposed, however, from this 
circumstance, which is so well known as to 
have attracted universal observation, that the 
taste for standard or more solid literature has 
either materially declined, or is in any danger 
of becoming extinct. Decisive evidence to the 
contrary is to be found in the fact, that a 
greater number of reprints of standard works, 
both on theology, history, and philosophy, have 
issued from the press within the last ten years, 
than in any former corresponding period of 
British history. And what is still more re- 
markable, and not a little gratifying, it is evi- 



* Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1842.— Written 
when Lord Mahon's Copyright Bill, since passed into a 
law, was before Parliament. 



dent, from the very different character and 
price of the editions of the older works which 
have been published of late years, that the de- 
sire to possess these standard works, and this 
thirst for solid information, is not confined to 
any one class of society ; but that it embraces 
all ranks, and promises, before a long period 
has elapsed, to extend through the middle and 
even the working classes in the state a mass 
of useful and valuable information to which 
they have hitherto, in great part at least, been 
strangers. Not to mention the great extent to 
which extracts from these more valuable works 
have appeared in Chambers' Journal, the Penny 
Magazines, and other similar publications of 
the day, it is sufficient to mention two facts, 
which show at once what a thirst for valuable 
information exists among the middle classes 
of society. Regularly every two years, there 
issues from the press a new edition of Gibbon's 
Rome: and Burke's Works are now published, 
one year, in sixteen handsome volumes octavo, 
for the peer and the legislator, and next year 
in two volumes royal octavo, in double co- 
lumns, for the tradesman and the shopkeeper. 
As little is the false and vitiated taste of our 
general literature the result of any want of 
ability which is now directed to its prosecution. 
We have only to examine the periodical litera- 
ture, or criticism of the day, to be convinced 
that the talent which is now devoted to litera- 
ture is incomparably greater than it ever was 
in any former period of our history ; and that 
ample genius exists in Great Britain, to render 
this age as distinguished in philosophy and the 
higher branches of knowledge, as the last was 
in military prowess and martial renown. If 
any one doubts this, let him compare the milk- 
and-water pages of the Monthly Review forty 
years ago, with the brilliant criticisms of 
Lockhart and Macaulay in the Quarterly or Ed- 
inburgh Review at this time ; or the periodical 
literature at the close of the war, with that 
which is now to be seen in the standard ma- 
gazines of the present day. To a person 
habituated to the dazzling conceptions of the 
periodical writers in these times, the corre 
sponding literature in the eighteenth century 
appears insupportably pedantic and tedious. 
p 2 



174 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Nobody now reads the Rambler or the Idler ; 
and the colossal reputation of Johnson rests 
almost entirely upon his profound and caustic 
sayings recorded in Boswell. Even the Spec- 
tator itself, though universally praised, is by 
no means now generally read; and nothing 
but the exquisite beauty of some of Addison's 
papers, prevents the Delias and Lucindas, who 
figure in its pages, from sinking them into 
irrecoverable obscurity. 

Here then is the marvel of the present time. 
We have a population, in which, from the 
rapid extent of knowledge among all classes, a 
more extended class of readers desiring in- 
formation is daily arising; in which the great 
and standard works of literature in theology, 
philosophy, and history, are constantly issuing 
in every varied form from the press ; in which 
unparalleled talent of every description is con- 
stantly devoted to the prosecution of literature ; 
but in which the new works given forth from 
the press are, with very few exceptions, fri- 
volous or ephemeral, and the greater part of 
the serious talents of the nation is turned into 
the perishable channels of the daily, weekly, 
monthly, or the quarterly press. That such a 
state of things is anomalous and extraordinary, 
few probably will doubt ; but that it is alarm- 
ing and prejudicial in a national point of view, 
and may, if it continues unabated, produce both 
a degradation of the national character, and, in 
the end, danger or ruin to the national fortunes, 
though not so generally admitted, is not the 
less true, nor the less capable of demonstra- 
tion. 

In the first place, this state of things, when 
the whole talent of the nation is directed to 
periodical literature, or works of evanescent 
interest, has a tendency to degrade the national 
character, because it taints the fountains from 
which the national thought is derived. We 
possess, indeed, in the standard literature of 
Great Britain, a mass of thoughts and ideas 
which may well make the nation immortal, 
and which, to the end of time, will constitute 
the fountains from which grand and generous 
thoughts will be drawn by all future races of 
men. But the existence of these standard works 
is not enough; still less is it enough in an age 
of rapid progress and evident transition, such 
as the present, when new interests are every- 
where arising, new social and political com- 
binations emerging, new national dangers to 
be guarded against, new national virtues to be 
required. For a nation in such a state of 
society to remain satisfied with its old standard 
literature, and not to aspire to produce any 
thing which is at once durable and new, is the 
same solecism as it would be for a man to re- 
main content with a wardrobe of fifty years' 
standing, and resolutely to resist the introduc- 
tion of any of the fashions or improvements 
of later times. A nation which aspires to 
retain its eminence either in arts or in arms, 
must keep abreast of its neighbours; if it does 
not advance, it will speedily fall behind, be 
thrown into the shade, and decline. It is not 
sufficient for England to refer to the works of 
Milton, Shakspeare, Johnson, or Scott ; she 
must prolong the race of these great men, or 
Vi intellectual career will speedily come to a 



close. Short and fleeting indeed is the period 
of transcendant greatness allotted to any na- 
tion in any branch of thought. The moment 
it stops, it begins to recede ; and to every em- 
pire which has made intellectual triumphs, is 
prescribed the same law which was felt by 
Napoleon in Europe and the British in India 
that conquest is essential to existence. 

But if the danger to our national literaturf 
is great, if the intellect and genius of Britain 
do not keep pace with the high destinies to 
which she is called, and the unbounded men- 
tal activity with which she is surrounded, 
much more serious is the peril thence inevit- 
ably accruing to the national character and 
the public fortunes. Whence is it that the 
noble and generous feelings are derived, which 
in time past have animated the breasts of our 
patriots, our heroes, and our legislators? 
Where, but in the immortal pages of our 
poets, our orators, and historians ? What 
noble sentiments has the air of "Rule Britan- 
nia" awakened; how many future Nelsons 
may the "Mariners of England," or Southey's 
inimitable "Lives of our Naval Heroes" pro- 
duce? Sentiments such as these immortal 
works imbody, "thoughts that breathe, and 
words that burn," are the true national inhe- 
ritance; they constitute the most powerful 
elements of national strength, for they form the 
character, without which all others are una- 
vailing; they belong alike to the rich and to 
the poor, to the prince and to the peasant ; 
they form the unseen bond which links to- 
gether the high and the low, the rich and the 
poor ; and which, penetrating and pervading 
every class of society, tend both to perpetuate 
the virtues which have brought us to our pre- 
sent greatness, and arrest the decline, which 
the influx of wealth, and the prevalence of 
commercial ideas, might otherwise have a 
tendency to produce. What would be the 
effect upon the fortunes of the nation, if this 
pure and elevated species of literature were to 
cease amongst us ; if every thing were to be 
brought down to the cheapest market, and 
adapted to the most ordinary capacity ; if cut- 
ting articles for reviews, or dashing stories 
for magazines, were henceforth to form our 
staple literature ; and the race of the Miltons, 
the Shakspeares, the Grays, and the Camp- 
bells, was to perish under the cravings of an 
utilitarian age? We may safely say that the 
national character would decline, the national 
spirit become enfeebled ; that generous senti- 
ments would be dried up under the influence 
of transient excitement, and permanent resolve 
be extinguished by the necessity of present 
gain ; and that the days of Clive and Wellesley 
in India, and of Nelson and Wellington in 
Europe, would be numbered among the things 
that have been. 

But if such dangers await us from the 
gradual extinction of the higher and nobler 
branches of our literature, still more serious 
are the evils which are likely to arise from the 
termination of the more elevated class of works 
in history, philosophy, and theology, which are 
calculated and are fitted to guide and direct the 
national thought. The dangers of such a ca- 
lamity, though not so apparent at first sight, 



THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION. 



175 



are, in reality, still more serious. For whence 
is the thought derived which governs the world; 
the spirit which guides its movements; the 
rashness which mars its fortunes; the wisdom 
which guards against its dangers'? Whence 
but from the great fountains of original thought, 
which are never unlocked in any age but to the 
few master-spirits thrown at distant intervals 
by God among mankind. The press, usually 
and justly deemed so powerful; the public 
voice, whose thunders shake the land; the le- 
gislature, which imbodies and perpetuates, by 
legal force, its cravings, are themselves but the 
reverberation of the thought of the great of the 
preceding age. The tempests sweep round 
and agitate the globe; but it is to the wisdom 
of Juno alone that .■Eolus opens the cavern of 
the winds. 

This truth is unpalatable to the masses; it 
is distasteful to legislators; it is irksome to 
statesmen, who conceive they enjoy, and appear 
to have, the direction of affairs; but it is illus- 
trated by every page of history, and a clear 
perception of its truth constitutes one of the 
most essential requisites of wise government. 
In vain does the ruling power, whether mo- 
narchical, aristocratic, or republican, seek to 
escape from the government of thought: it is 
itself under the direction of the great intellects 
of the preceding age. When it thinks it is 
original, when it is most fearlessly asserting 
its boasted inherent power of self-government, 
it is itself obeying the impulse communicated 
to the human mind by the departed great. All 
the marked movements of mankind, all the 
evident turns or wrenches communicated to 
the current of general opinion, have arisen 
from the efforts of individual genius. The 
age must have been prepared for them, or 
their effect would have been small; but the 
age without them would never have disco- 
vered the light: the reflected sunbeams must 
have been descending on the mountains, but 
his earliest rays strike first on the summit. 

Who turned mankind from the abuses of the 
Roman Catholic church, and preserved the 
primeval simplicity of Christianity from the 
pernicious indulgences of the Church of Rome, 
and opened a new era of religious light to both 
hemispheres ! Martin Luther. Who fearlessly 
led his trembling mariners across the seem- 
ingly interminable deserts of the Atlantic wave, 
and discovered at length the new world, which 
had haunted even his infant dreams ! Chris- 
topher Columbus. Who turned mankind aside 
from the returning circle of syllogistic argu- 
ment to the true method of philosophic inves- 
tigation ! Lord Bacon. Who introduced a 
new code into the contests of nations, and sub- 
jected even the savage passions of war to a 
human code'! Grotius. The influence of Mon- 
tesquieu has been felt for above a century in 
every country of Europe, in social philosophy. 
Who discovered the mechanism of the uni- 
verse, and traced the same law in the fall of 
an apple as the giant orbit of the comets'? Sir 
Isaac Newton. Who carried the torch of 
severe and sagacious inquiry into recesses of 
the human mind, and weaned men from the 
endless maze of metaphysical scepticism? 
Dr. Reid. Who produced the fervent spirit 



which, veiled in philanthropy, redolent of be- 
nevolence, was so soon to be extinguished in 
the blood of the French Revolution! Rous- 
seau and Voltaire. Who discovered the mira- 
cle of steam, and impelled civilization, as by 
the force of central heat, to the desert places 
of the earth ! James Watt. What unheeded 
power shook even the solid fabric of the 
British constitution, and all but destroyed, by 
seeking unduly to extend, the liberties of Eng- 
land? Lord Brougham, and the Edinburgh 
Reviewers. Whose policy has ruled the com- 
mercial system of England for twenty years, 
and by the false application of just abstract prin- 
ciples overthrew the Whig ministry! Adam 
Smith. Whose spirit arrested the devastation 
of the French Revolution, and checked the 
madness of the English reformers ! Edmund 
Burke. Who is the real parent of the blind 
and heartless delusion of the New Poor-Law 
Bill ! Malthus. Who have elevated men from 
the baseness of utilitarian worship to the gran- 
deur of mental elevation! Coleridge and 
Wordsworth. All these master-spirits, for 
good or for evil, communicated their own im- 
press to the generation which succeeded them ; 
the seed sown took often many years to come 
to maturity, and many different hands, often a 
new generation, were required to reap it; but 
when the harvest appeared, it at once was 
manifest whose hand had sown the seed. 
"Show me what one or two great men, de- 
tached from public life, but with minds full, 
which must be disburdened, are thinking in 
their closets in this age, and I will tell you 
what will be the theme of the orator, the study 
of the philosopher, the staple of the press, the 
guide of the statesman, in the next." 

Observe, too — and this is a most essential 
point in the present argument — that all these 
great efforts of thought which have thus given 
a mighty heave to human affairs, and, in the 
end, have fairly turned aside into a new 
channel even the broad and varied stream of 
general thought, have been in direct contradic- 
tion to the spirit of the age by which they 
were surrounded, and which swayed alike the 
communities, the press, and the government, 
under the influence of which they were placed. 
Action and reaction appear to be the great 
law, not less of the moral than the material 
world; the counteracting principles, which, 
like the centripetal and centrifugal force in 
physics, maintain, amid its perpetual oscilla- 
tion, the general equilibrium of the universe. 
But whence is to come the reaction, if the 
human mind, influenced by the press, is itself 
retained in a self-revolving circle! if reviews, 
magazines, and journals, all yielding to, or 
falling in with, the taste of the majority, direct 
and form public opinion: if individual thought 
is nothing but the perpetual re-echo of what it 
hears around it? It is in the solitary thought 
of individual greatness that this is found. It 
is there that the fountains are unlocked which 
let in a new stream on human affairs — which 
communicate a fresh and a purer element to 
the flood charged with the selfishness and vices 
of the world; it is there that the counteracting 
force is found, which, springing from small 
beginnings, at length converts a world in error 



176 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Archimedes was physically wrong, but he was 
morally right, when he said, " Give me a ful- 
crum, and I will move the whole earth." Give 
me the fulcrum of a great mind, and I will turn 
aside the world. 

It is always in resisting, never by yielding 
to public opinion, that these great master- 
spirits exert their power. The conqueror, in- 
deed, who is to act by the present arms of 
men; the statesman who is to sway by present 
measures the agitated masses of society, have 
need of general support. Napoleon said truly 
that he was so long successful, because he 
always marched with the opinions of five mil- 
lions of men. But the great intellects which 
are destined to give a permanent change to 
thought — which are destined to act generally, 
not upon the present but the next generation — 
are almost invariably in direct opposition to 
general opinion. In truth, it is the resistance 
of a powerful mind to the flood of error by 
which it is surrounded, which, like the com- 
pression that elicits the power of steam, creates 
the moving power which alters the moral des- 
tiny of mankind. 

Was it by yielding to public opinion that 
Bacon emancipated mankind from the fetters 
of the Aristotelian philosophy? Was it by 
yielding to the Ptolemaic cycles that Coperni- 
cus unfolded the true mechanism of the hea- 
vens? Was it by yielding to the dogmas of 
the church that Galileo established the earth's 
motions? Was it by yielding to the Romish 
corruptions that Luther established the Re- 
formation ? Was it by concession that Lati- 
mer and Ridley " lighted a flame which, by 
the grace of God, shall never be extinguished ?" 
Was it by conceding to the long-established 
system of commercial restriction, that Smith 
unfolded the truths of the wealth of nations ? 
— or by chiming in with the deluge of infideli- 
ty and democracy, with which he was sur- 
rounded, that Burke arrested the devastation 
of the French Revolution ? What were the 
eloquence of Pitt, the arms of Nelson and 
Wellington, but the ministers of those princi- 
ples which, in opposition to general opinion, 
he struck out at once, and with a giant's arm? 
"Genius creates by a single conception; in a 
single principle, opening, as it were, on a 
sudden to genius, a great and new system of 
thing?, is discovered. The statuary conceives 
a statue at once, which is afterwards slowly 
executed by the hands of many."* 

If such be the vast and unbounded influence 
of original thought on human affairs, national 
character, public policy, and national fortunes, 
what must he the effect of that state of things 
which goes to check such original concep- 
tion? — to vulgarize and debase genius, and 
turn aside the streams of first conception into 
the old and polluted channels ? If the reac- 
tion of originality against common-place — of 
freedom against servility — of truth against 
falsehood — of experience against speculation 
— is the great steadying power in human af- 
fairs, and the only safe regulator of the oscil- 
lations of public thought, what are we to say 
to that direction of literary effort, and that 



♦ D'Israeli's Essay on Lit. Char. 



tendency in the public mind, which evidently 
tend to express, and may, ere long, altogether 
extinguish these great and creative concep- 
tions ? Yet, that such is the evident tendency 
of society and public opinion around us, is ob- 
vious, and universally observed. " The time 
has come," says Sir Edward Bulwer,* One of 
the brightest ornaments of the liberal school, 
"when nobody will fit out a ship for the intel- 
lectual Columbus to discover new worlds, but 
when everybody will subscribe for his setting 
up a steamboat between Dover and Calais. 
The immense superficies of the public, as it 
has now become, operates two ways in de- 
tracting from the profundity of writers — it 
renders it no longer necessary for an author 
to make himself profound before he writes ; 
and it encourages those writers who are pro- 
found, by every inducement, not of lucre mere- 
ly, but of fame, to exchange deep writing for 
agreeable writing. The voice which animates 
the man ambitious of wide fame, does not, ac- 
cording to the beautiful line in Rogers, whis- 
per to him, 'Aspire, but descend.' He must 
' stoop to conquer.' Thus, if we look abroad 
in France, where the reading public is much 
less numerous than in England, a more subtle 
and refined tone is prevalent in literature; 
while in America, where it is infinitely larger, 
the literature is incomparably more superfi- 
cial. Some high-souled literary men, indeed, 
desirous rather of truth than of fame, are ac- 
tuated unconsciously by the spirit of the times ; 
but actuated they necessarily are, just as the 
wisest orator who uttered only philosophy to 
a thin audience of Sages, and mechanically 
abandons his refinements and his reasonings, 
and expands into a louder tone and more fami- 
liar manner as the assembly increases, and 
the temper of the popular mind is insensibly 
communicated to the mind that addresses it." 
" There is in great crowds," says Cousin, " an 
ascendant which is almost magical, which 
subdues at once the strongest minds; and the 
same man who had been a serious and in- 
structive professor to a hundred thoughtful 
students, soon becomes light and superficial 
where he is called to address a more extended 
and superficial audience." 

There can be no doubt of the justice of 
the principles advanced by these profound 
writers : in truth, they are not new ; they 
have been known and acted upon in every 
age of mankind. — "You are wrong to pride 
yourself," said the Grecian sage to an Athe- 
nian orator, who first delivered a speech 
amidst the thundering acclamations of his 
audience; "if you had spoken truly, these 
men would have given no signs of approba- 
tion." It is in the extension of the power of 
judging of literary compositions — of confer- 
ring wealth and bestowing fame on their au- 
thors — to the vast and excitable, but superficial 
mass of mankind, that the true cause of the 
ephemeral and yet entrancing and exciting 
character of the literature of the present age 
is to be found. Some superficial observers 
imagine that the taste for novels and romances 
will wear itself out, and an appreciation of a 



* England and English, p. 446. 



THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION. 



177 



higher class of literature spread generally 
among the middle classes. They might as 
well suppose that all men are to become Ho- 
mers, and all women Sapphos. 

It is in this fact, the immense number of 
mankind in every age who are influenced by 
their passions or their feelings, compared with 
the small portion who are under the influence 
of their reason, lhat the true cause and extra- 
ordinary multitude of a certain class of novels 
in the present day is to be found. Without de- 
preciating the talent of many of these writers 
— without undervaluing the touching scenes 
of pathos, and admirable pictures of humour 
which they present — it may safely be affirmed, 
that they exhibit a melancholy proof of the 
tendency of our lighter literature; and that if 
such works were to become as general in 
every succeeding age as they have been in 
the present, a ruinous degradation both to our 
literary and national character would ensue. 
The cause which has led to their rapid rise 
and unprecedented success, is obvious. It is, 
that the middle classes have become the most 
numerous body of readers; and therefore, the 
humour, the incidents, the pathos, which are 
familiar to them, or excite either amusement 
or sympathy in their breasts, constitute the 
surest passports to popularity. It was the 
same cause which produced the boors of 
Ostade, or the village wakes of Teniers in 
republican Holland, and the stately declama- 
tions of Racine and Corneille in monarchical 
France. 

It is nevertheless perfectly true, as has been 
well remarked hy Lord Brougham, that there 
never was such a mistake as to imagine that 
mob oratory consists only in low buffoonery, 
quick repartee, or happy personal hits. On 
some occasions, and certainly on the hustings, 
it generally does. But there are other occa- 
sions on which the middle and even the work- 
ing classes are accessible to the most noble 
and elevated sentiments; and exhibit an apti- 
tude both for the quick apprehension of an 
argument, and the due appreciation of a gene- 
rous sentiment, which could not be surpassed 
in any assembly in the kingdom. The higher 
class of operatives, moreover, especially in 
the manufacturing districts, are so constantly 
in contact with each other, and are so much 
habituated to the periodical press, that they 
have acquired an extraordinary quickness of 
perception in matters which fall within their 
observation; while the numerous vicissitudes 
to which they are exposed by commercial dis- 
tress, have, in many places, given a serious 
and reflecting turn to their minds, which will 
rarely be met with amidst the frivolities of the 
higher, or the selfish pursuits of the middle 
ranks. In assemblies of the working classes, 
brought together by the call for some social, 
and not political object, as the promotion of 
emigration, the extension of education, or the 
arresting the evils of pauperism, no one can 
have addressed them without observing that 
he cannot state his argument too closely, en- 
force it with facts too forcibly, or attend to 
the graces of composition with too sedulous 
care. 

But all this notwithstanding, it is in vain to 
23 



expect that the patronage or support of the 
middle or working classes is ever to afford a 
sufficient inducement to secure works either 
of profound or elevated thought, or of the 
highest excellence in any branch either of 
poetry, philosophy, history, or economics. 
The reason is, that it is only by appealing to 
principles or ideas already in some degree fami- 
liar to the great body of the people, that you can 
ever succeed in making any impression upon 
them. Truth, if altogether new, is, in the first 
instance at least, thrown away upon them ; 
it is of exceeding slow descent, even through 
the most elevated intellects of the middle 
classes; upon the working it produces at first 
no effect whatever. The reason is, that the 
great majority of them have not intellects suf- 
ficiently strong to make at once the transition 
from long cherished error to truth, unless the 
evils of their former opinions have been long 
and forcibly brought before their senses. If 
that be the case, indeed, the humblest classes 
are the very first to see the light. Witness 
the Reformation in Germany, or the Revolu- 
tion in France. They are so, because they 
are less interested than their superiors in the 
maintenance of error. But if the new disco- 
veries of thought relate not to present but re- 
mote evils, and do not appeal to what is 
universally known to the senses, but only to 
what may with difficulty be gathered from 
study or reflection, nothing is more certain 
than that the progress even of truth is exceed- 
ingly slow — that the human mind is to the 
last degree reluctant to admit any great change 
of opinion ; and that, in general, at least one 
generation must descend to their graves before 
truths, ultimately deemed the most obvious, 
are gradually forced upon the reluctant con- 
sent of mankind. Mr. Burke's speeches never 
were popular in the House of Commons, and 
his rising up acted like a dinner-bell in thin- 
ning the benches. Now his words are dwelt 
on by the wise, quoted by the eloquent, dif- 
fused among the many. Oratory, to be popu- 
lar, must be in advance of the audience, and 
but a little in advance; profound thought may 
rule mankind in future, but unless stimulated 
by causes obvious to all, will do little for pre- 
sent reputation. Hence it was that Bacon 
bequeathed his reputation to the generation 
after the next. 

As little is there any reason to hope that the 
obvious and gratifying return to serious and 
standard publications, evinced by the numer- 
ous reprints of our classical writers that issue 
from the press, can be taken as any sufficient 
indication that there exists in the public mind 
an adequate antidote to these evils. The fact 
of these reprints of standard works issuing 
from the press, certainly proves sufficiently 
that there is a class, and a numerous one too, 
of persons who, however much they may like 
superficial literature as an amusement for the 
hour, yet look to our standard works for the 
volumes which are to fill their libraries. But 
that by no means affords a sufficient guarantee 
that the public will give any encouragement 
to the composition or publication of standard 
works at the present time, and with the present 
temper of the national mind. There is a most 



178 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



material difference between the reprint of a 
standard book, which has already acquired a 
fixed reputation, and the composition of a new 
work of a serious and contemplative cast, es- 
pecially by an unknown author, and more 
particularly if it is in opposition to the general 
current of public opinion. It may safely be 
predicted of such a work, that if it really con- 
tains new and important truths, it will be dis- 
tasteful to the majority of readers in all classes ; 
and that whatever fame may in future be be- 
stowed on its author, or however widely it may 
hereafter be read by the public, or command 
the assent of mankind, he will be in his grave 
before either effect takes place. Adam Smith, 
if we mistake not, had died before the Wealth 
of Nations had got past even a second edition, 
certainly before its principles had made any 
material progress in the general mind. Seve- 
ral years had elapsed before a hundred copies 
of Mr. Hume's History were sold ; and he him- 
self has told us, that nothing but the earnest 
entreaties of his friends induced him, in the 
face of such a cold and chilling reception, to 
continue his historical labours. Although, 
therefore, there exists a steady demand for 
standard classical works, it is by no means 
equally apparent that any thing like an ade- 
quate encouragement in the general case for 
the composition of new standard works, is to 
be found in the present state of society. Few 
men have the self-denial, like Bacon, to be- 
queath their reputation to the generation after 
the next, and to labour for nothing during the 
whole of their own lifetime ; and the chance 
of finding persons who will do so, is much 
diminished, when society has reached that 
period in which, by simply lowering his mode 
of composition, and descending from being the 
instructor to be the amuser of men, the author 
can obtain both profit and celebrity from a 
numerous and flattering class of readers. 

Nor is there the slightest ground for the 
hope, that the strong diversion of philosophi- 
cal and literary talent into the periodical litera- 
ture of the day, has only turned it into a new 
channel, and not diminished its amount or im- 
paired its usefulness. If we contemplate, 
indeed, the periodical literature of the day, 
every one must be struck with astonishment 
at the prodigious amount and versatility of 
talent which it displays. But how much of 
that has realized itself in works of a perma- 
nent or durable character, calculated to instruct 
or delight future ages 1 Turn to the early 
criticisms of the Edinburgh Review, flowing, as 
they did, from the able and varied pens of 
Brougham, Jeffrey, and Sydney Smith, and see 
how many of them will stand the test which 
thirty years' subsequent experience has afford- 
ed 1 Few persons now read the early cri- 
tiques in the Quarterly Review, supported as 
they were by the talent of Gifford, Lockhart, 
Croker, and Dudley, which affords decisive 
evidence of the way in which each succeeding 
wave of periodical criticism buries in oblivion 
the last. Various attempts have been made to 
select from the immense mass of these periodi- 
cals, such of the pieces as appeared likely to 
attract permanent interest ; but none of them 
have any remarkable success, if we except the 



best criticisms of Jeffrey and the splendid essays 
of Macaulay, which have formed a valuable 
addition to our standard literature. 

The reason why periodical essays, how able 
soever, seldom succeed in acquiring a lasting 
reputation, is this. It is too deeply impreg- 
nated with the passions, the interests, and the 
errors of the moment. This arises from the 
same cause which Bulwer and Cousin have 
remarked as necessarily changing the character 
of oratory in proportion to the size of the audi- 
ence to which it is addressed. Temporary 
literature necessarily shares in the temporary 
nature of the passions of which it is the mirror. 
Every one who is accustomed to that species 
of composition knows, that if he does not strike 
at the prevailing feeling of the moment, in the 
great majority of his readers he will produce 
no sort of impression, and he will very soon 
find his contributions returned upon his hand 
by the editor. " The great talent of Mirabeau," 
says Dumont, " consisted in this, that he in- 
tuitively saw to what point in the minds of his 
audience to apply his strength, and he sent it 
home there with the strength of a giant." That 
is precisely the talent required in periodical 
literature ; and accordingly, every one engaged 
in it, is aware that he writes an article for a 
magazine or review in a very different style 
from what he does in any composition intended 
for durable existence. If we turn to the politi- 
cal articles in any periodical ten or fifteen 
years old, what a multitude of facts do we find 
distorted, of theories disproved by the result, 
of anticipations which have proved fallacious, 
of hopes which have terminated only in disap- 
pointment 1 This is no reproach to the writers. 
It is the necessary result of literary and philo- 
sophical talent keenly and energetically applied 
to the interests of the hour. It is in the cool 
shade of retirement, and by men detached from 
the contests of the world, that truth in social 
and moral affairs is really to be discovered; 
but how are we to look for that quality amidst 
the necessary cravings of an excited age, seek- 
ing after something new in fiction, or the 
passions of a divided community finding vent 
on politics in the periodical press ? 

The great profits which now accrue to 
authors who are lucky enough to hit upon a 
popular view with the public, is another cir- 
cumstance which tends most powerfully to 
stamp this fleeting and impassioned character, 
both upon our creations of imagination and 
periodical effusions of political argument. 
The days are gone past when Johnson wrote 
in a garret in Fleet Street the sonorous periods 
which a subsequent century have admired, 
under the name of Chatham. The vast in- 
crease of readers, particularly in the middle 
and lower ranks, has opened sources of literary 
profit, and avenues to literary distinction, un- 
known in any former age. A successful article 
in a magazine or review brings a man into 
notice in the literary world, just as effectually 
as a triumphant debut makes the fortune of an 
actress or singer. But how is this success to 
be kept up ? or how is this profit to be con- 
tinued 1 Not certainly by turning aside from 
periodical literature to the cool shades of medi- 
tation or retirement, but by engaging still more 



THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION. 



179 



deeply in the stirring bustle of the times ; by 
catering to the craving for continued excite- 
ment, or plunging into the stream of turbulent 
politics. If, instead of doing so, he sits " on a 
hill retired," and labours for the benefit of 
mankind, and the instruction of posterity in a 
future age, he will soon find the cold shoulder 
of the public turned towards him. He may 
acquire immortal fame by his labours, but he 
will soon find that, unless he has a profession 
or independent fortune, he is gradually verging 
towards a neglected home — the garret. Where- 
as, if he engages in the pursuit of fiction, or 
plunges into the stream of politics, he will ere- 
long be gratified by finding, if he has talents 
adequate to the undertaking, that fame and 
fortune pour in upon him, that his society is 
courted, and his name celebrated, and not un- 
frequently political patronage rewards passing 
talent or service with durable honours or 
rewards. 

Nothing, indeed, is more certain than that 
nothing great, either in philosophy, literature, 
or art, was ever purchased by gold ; that genius 
unfolds her treasures to disinterested votaries 
only; and that but one reason can be assigned 
why such clusters of great men occasionally 
appear in the world, that " God Almighty," in 
Hallam's words, "has chosen at those times to 
create them." But admitting that neither gold 
nor honours can purchase genius, or unlock 
truth, the question is, to what extent they may 
draw aside talent, even of the highest class, from 
the cold and shivering pinnacles of meditation 
and thought, into the rich and flowery vales of 
politics, amusement, or imagination. The 
point is not what they can do, but what they 
can cause to be left undone. Doubtless there 
are occasionally to be found men of the very 
highest character of intellect and principle, 
who, born to direct mankind, feel their destiny, 
and, in defiance of all the seductions of fame or 
interest, pursue it with invincible perseverance 
to the end. But such men are rare ; they sel- 
dom appear more than once in a generation. 
Above all, they are least likely to arise, and 
most likely to be diverted from their proper 
destiny in an age of commercial opulence and 
greatness, or of strong political or social ex- 
citement. The universal thirst for gold, the 
general experience of its necessity to confer 
not merely comfort but respectability — the faci- 
lity with which genius may acquire it, if it will 
condescend to fall in with the temper of the 
times — the utter barrenness of its efforts, if it 
indulges merely in the abstract pursuit of truth, 
how clearly soever destined for immortality in 
a future age — the distinction to be immediately 
acquired by lending its aid to the strife of parties, 
or condescending to amuse an insatiable pub- 
lic — the long-continued neglect which is certain 
to ensue, if works likely to procure durable 
celebrity are attempted — are so many tempta- 
tions which assail the literary adventurer on 
his path, and which, if not resisted by the he- 
roic sense of duty of aThalaba, will infallibly 
divert him from his appointed mission of pierc- 
ing the Idol of Error to the heart. 

These causes of danger to our standard lite- 
rature become more pressing, when it is recol- 
lected that, by the fixed practice and apparently 



constitutional usage of this mixed aristocratic 
and commercial realm, no distinctions of rank 
are ever conferred upon literary ability, how 
distinguished soever. Sir Walter Scott, indeed, 
and Sir Edward Bulwer have been made baro- 
nets; but, in the first instance, it was on the 
personal friend of George IV. that this honour 
was conferred, not the great novelist; in the 
second, to the literary parliamentary support- 
er, not the author of England and the English, 
that the reward was given. Both indeed were 
entirely worthy of the honour; but the honour 
would never have been bestowed on the Scotch 
novelist, if he had been unknown in the aris- 
tocratic circles of London, and never dined 
at Carlton House; or on the English, if he had 
been a stranger to the Whig coteries of the 
metropolis. The proof of this is decisive. 
Look at what we have done for our greatest 
men, who had not these adventitious aids to 
court favour. We made Burns an excise of- 
ficer and Adam Smith a commissioner of cus- 
toms. 

The influence of this circumstance is very 
great; and the want of any such national ho- 
nours is an additional cause of the fleeting and 
ephemeral character of our general literature. 
The soldier and the sailor are certain, if they 
distinguish themselves, of obtaining such re- 
wards. Look at the long list of knights com- 
manders of the Bath, in both services, who were 
promoted by the last brevet. Nothing can be 
more just than conferring such distinctions on 
these gallant men ; they compensate to them the 
inequality of their fortunes, and stimulate them 
to heroic and daring exploits. The successful 
lawyer often comes in the end to take prece- 
dence of every peer in the realm, and becomes 
the founder of a family which transmits his 
wealth and his honours to remote generations. 
The honoured names of Hardwicke, Loughbo- 
rough, Mansfield, and Eldon, have been trans- 
mitted with princely fortunes to an ennobled 
posterity. But to literary abilities none of these 
higher and elevating objects of ambition are 
open. The great author can neither found a 
family nor acquire a title; and if he does not 
choose to degrade himself by falling in with 
the passions or frivolities of the age, it is more 
than probable that, like the Israelites of old, 
his life will be spent in wandering in the de- 
sert, and he will see only, in his last hour, and 
that from afar, the promised land. And yet 
what is the influence of the soldier, the lawyer, 
or the statesman, compared to that which a 
great and profound writer exercises ? and what 
do the monarchs, the cabinets, and the generals 
of one age do, but carry into effect the princi- 
ples enforced by the master-spirits of the pre- 
ceding 1 

It is evident, therefore, that there are a vari- 
ety of causes, some of a positive, some of a 
negative kind, which are operating together to 
depress the character of our literature; to chill 
the aspirations of genius, or the soarings of 
intellect ; to enlist fancy on the side of fashion, 
and genius in the pursuit of fiction ; to bind 
down lasting intellect to passing interests, and 
compel it to surrender to party what was meant 
for mankind. This is not a class interest ; it 
is an universal concern. It involves nothing 



180 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



less than the dearest interests and future fate 
of the nation ; for what sort of people will we 
soon become, if temporary passions, interests, 
or frivolities, alone engross the talent of the 
empire; and the great lights of genius and in- 
tellect, which might enable us to keep abreast 
of our fortunes, become extinct among us 1 
What are we to say are likely to be the prin- 
ciples of our statesmen, our legislators, or our 
rulers, if the elevating and ennobling principles 
of former times are gradually forgotten, and 
no successors to the race of giants arise to di- 
rect, purify, and elevate the public mind, amidst 
the rapidly increasing dangers which assail it, 
in the later and more opulent stages of society 1 
What are we to expect but that we are to fall 
into the listless cravings of the Athenians, who 
were constantly employed in seeing and hear- 
ing something new ; or to the deplorable destiny 
of the Byzantine empire, which, amidst inces- 
sant literary exertion and amusement, did not 
produce a single work of genius for a thousand 
years] And if such mingled talent and frivo- 
lity should permanently lay hold of the British 
mind, what can we expect but that our latter 
end shall be like theirs, and that centuries of 
progressive degradation and ultimate national 
extinction will terminate the melancholy era 
of social regeneration on which we have just 
entered. 

It is perhaps of still more importance to ob- 
serve, what, though equally true, is not so gene- 
rally admitted, that these causes of degradation, 
so far from being likely to be alleviated or ar- 
rested by the progressive extension of the taste 
for reading among the middle and lower classes 
of society, are, unhappily, too likely to be daily 
increased by that very circumstance. As it is 
the extension of the power of reading to the mid- 
dle and working classes, that has, in a great part, 
produced the present ephemeral character of our 
literature, and the incessant demand for works 
of excitement; so nothing appears more cer- 
tain, than that this tendency is likely to aug- 
ment with the extension of that class of readers. 
The middle and lower orders, indeed, who are 
so closely brought into contact with the real 
difficulties and stern realities of life, will al- 
ways, in every popular community, cause a 
large part of the talent and intellect of the nation 
to be directed, not merely to works of amuse- 
ment, but works of utility, and having an im- 
mediate bearing on the improvement of art, the 
extension of commerce, or the amelioration of 
the material interests of society. But these 
labours, however useful and important, belong 
to a secondary class of thought, and encourage 
only a second class of literary labourers. 
They are the instruments of genius, not genius 
itself; they are the generals and colonels in the 
great army of thought, but not the commander- 
in-chief. " In the infancy of a nation," says 
Bacon, "arms do prevail; in its manhood, 
arms and learning for a short season ; in its de- 
cline, commerce and the mechanical arts." 
The application of energy, talent, and industry, 
to material purposes, however useful or neces- 
sary those purposes may be, savours of the 
physical necessities, not the spiritual dignity of 
man ; and the general turning of public effort 
in that direction is a symptom of the decline 



of nations. Let us not therefore lay the flat- 
tering unction to our souls, that the craving 
for the excitement of fiction, or the realities 
of mechanical improvement, which have ex- 
tended so immensely among us, with the spread 
of knowledge among the middle and working 
classes, are to prove any antidote to the decline 
of the highest class of literature amongst us. 
On the contrary, they are among the most 
powerful causes which produce it. 

Real genius and intellect of the highest cha- 
racter, it can never be too often repeated, works 
only for the future ; it rarely produces any im- 
pression, or brings in any reward whatever, at 
the present. Works of fiction or imagination, 
indeed, such as Sir Walter Scott's or Bulwer's 
novels, or Lord Byron's poetical romances, 
may produce an immediate impression, and 
yet be destined for durable existence ; but such 
a combination is extremely rare, and is in 
general confined entirely to works that please. 
Those that instruct or improve, destined to a 
yet longer existence, have a much slower 
growth, and often do not come to maturity till 
after the death of the author. 

" The solitary man of genius," says D'Israeli, 
"is arranging the materials of instruction and 
curiosity from every country and every age ; 
he is striking out, in the concussion of new 
light, a new order of ideas for his own times ; 
he possesses secrets which men hide from 
their contemporaries, truths they dared not 
utter, facts they dared not discover. View him 
in the stillness of meditation, his eager spirit 
busied over a copious page, and his eye spark- 
ling with gladness. He has concluded what 
his countrymen will hereafter cherish as the 
legacy of genius. You see him now changed; 
and the restlessness of his soul is thrown into 
his very gestures ! Could you listen to the 
vaccinator! But the next age only will quote 
his predictions. If he be the truly great au- 
thor, he will be best comprehended by posterity; 
for the result of ten years of solitary medita- 
tion has often required a whole century to be 
understood and to be adopted." 

We are no enemies to the conferring the 
honours of the crown upon the most distin- 
guished of our literary men. To many, such 
elevation would form a most appropriate re- 
ward ; to all, a legitimate object of ambition. 
But we are exceedingly jealous of the influence 
of all such court favours upon the assertors 
of political, social, or historical truth. We 
look to other countries, and we behold the 
withering effect of such distinctions upon the 
masculine independence of thought. We re- 
collect the titled and well-paid literature of 
France, under the Emperor Napoleon, and we 
ask, what has come of all that high-sounding 
panegyric? We read the annals of the digni- 
fied historians of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, 
and we sicken for the breath of a freeman. 
We remember it was only under a Trajan that 
a Tacitus could pour forth the indignation of 
expiring virtue at surrounding baseness, and 
we shudder to think how few Trajans are to 
be found in the decline of nations. 

The only legitimate and safe reward of the 
highest class of literary merit, next to the con- 
sciousness of discharging its mission, is to be 



THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION. 



181 



found in the prolongation of the period during 
which its profits are to accrue to the family of 
the author. We at once concede that even 
this motive, higher and more honourable than 
that of present or selfish gain, will never be 
sufficient to induce the loftiest class of genius 
or intellect to produce any great work. It is 
an overpowering sense of public duty — an 
ardent inspiration after deserved immortality — 
the yearnings of a full mind, which must be 
delivered — that are the real causes of such 
elevated efforts. They are given only to a 
few, because to a few only has God assigned 
the power of directing mankind. But, admit- 
ting that the divine inspiration is the fountain 
of truth — the " pure well of genius undefiled" 
— the point to be considered is, how is the 
stream which it pours forth to be kept in its 
proper channel? — how is it to be prevented 
from becoming rapidly merged in the agitated 
waves of human passion, or sunk in the bot- 
tomless morasses of interest or selfishness ? 
By giving something like perpetuity to the 
rights of authorship, this can be best effected ; 
because it is by so doing that we will most 
effectually ally it to the purest and most ele- 
vated motives which, in sublunary matters, 
can influence mankind. 

Look at the merchant, the lawyer, the manu- 
facturer, at all who amass fortunes, and leave 
the colossal estates which gradually elevate 
their possessors to the ranks of the aristocracy, 
and fill up in that class the chasms which for- 
tune, extravagance, or the extinction of fami- 
lies, so often produce. What are the motives 
which animate the founders of such families 
to a life of exertion, and produce the astonish- 
ing effects in the accumulation of wealth which 
we daily see around us ? It is not the desire 
of individual enjoyment; for, whatever his son 
may have, the father seldom knows any thing 
of wealth but of the labour by which it is 
created. It is not even for the distinction 
which he is to acquire during his own lifetime, 
that the successful professional man or mer- 
chant labours ; for, if that were his object, it 
would be far more effectually and more plea- 
santly gained,'by simply spending his wealth 
as fast as he made it. What, then, is the 
motive which animates him to a life of labour, 
and stimulates him through half a century to 
such incessant exertions? It is the hope of 
transmitting his fortune to his children — of 
securing the independence of those most dear 
to him ; it is the desire of founding a family — 
of leaving his descendants in a very different 
rank of life from that in which he himself 
moved, or his fathers before him. They know 
little of the human mind who are not aware 
that this desire, when it once takes hold of the 
mind, supplies the want of all other enjoy- 
ments, and that it is the secret, unobserved 
cause of the greatest individual and national 
efforts that have ever been achieved among 
mankind. 

To the due action of this important principle, 
however, a certain degree of permanence in the 
enjoyment of the fortune acquired is indispen- 
sable. Men will never make such long-con- 
tinued or sustained efforts for a temporary or 
passing interest Does any man suppose that 



a merchant or lawyer would toil for fifty years, 
if he knew that he could only expect an eight- 
and-twenty years' lease of his fortune ? " Give 
a man," says Arthur Young, " a seven years' 
lease of a garden, and he will soon convert it 
into a wilderness: give him a freehold in an 
arid desert, and he will not be long of convert- 
ing it into a garden." Is it probable that the 
industry of Great Britain would continue, if 
the old Jewish system of making all estates 
revert to the nation at the end of every fifty 
years were to be introduced, or Bronterre 
O'Brien's more summary mode of dividing 
every fortune at the death of the owner were 
put in practice? Truly, we should soon be- 
come an ephemeral and fleeting generation in 
wealth, as well as literature, if such maxims 
were acted upon ; and " to-day let us eat and 
drink, for to-morrow wc die," would at once 
become the order of the day. 

If the combined force of all these circum- 
stances be taken into consideration, it must be 
evident to every impartial mind, not only that 
it is not surprising that new standard literature 
has of late years so much declined amongst 
us, but that the only wonderful thing is, that it 
has not sunk much more than it has. The 
causes which produce great and sustained 
efforts in every other department of human ac- 
tivity, are not only withheld from the highest 
class of literary or philosophical exertion, but 
the persons engaged in them are perpetually 
exposed to the disturbing and detracting in- 
fluence of the prospect of fame and fortune 
being attained by condescending to cater for 
the passions or wants of the moment. To the 
continued energy and activity of the merchant 
or manufacturer, we offer the possession of 
unbounded wealth, and the prospect of trans- 
mitting an elevated, perhaps an ennobled race 
to future times. To the soldier or the sailor 
we hold out a vast succession of titled rewards, 
and, to the highest among such race of heroes, 
hereditary peerages — the deserved reward of 
their valour. To the indefatigable industry 
and persevering energy of the lawyer, we offer 
a seat on the Woolsack, precedence of every 
temporal peer in the realm, the highest tempo- 
ral dignities and hereditary honours which the 
state can afford. What, then, do we offer to 
the philosopher, the poet, or the historian, to 
the leaders of thought and the rulers of nations, 
to counteract the attractions of immediate or 
temporary ambition, and lead them abreast of 
their brethren at the bar, in the field, or the 
senate, to great and glorious efforts, to durable 
and beneficent achievement? Why, we pre- 
sent them with petty traders anxiously watch- 
ing the expiration of eight-and-twenty years 
of copyright, or hoping for the death of the 
author, if he has survived it; and ready, with 
uplifted hands, to pounce upon the glorious 
inheritance of his children, and realize for 
their own business-like skill and mercantile 
capital the vast profits which had been be- 
queathed by genius to the age which follow- 
ed it. 

It is a total mistake, to imagine that the 

profits of works of imagination, unless they 

are of the very highest class, ever equal those 

which in the end accrue to the publishers of 

Q 



182 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



standard works of history or philosophy. The 
booksellers, since Gibbon's death, are said to 
have made 200,000/. of his Decline and Fall of 
the Roman Empire ; and hardly a year passes, 
that a new edition of his immortal work, or 
of Hume's History of England, does not issue 
from the press. The sums realized by the 
bookselling trade from the different editions of 
the Wealth of Nations, would have constituted a 
large inheritance to the heirs of Adam Smith. 
What a princely fortune would Milton or 
Shakspeare have left to their descendants, if 
any there be, if they could have bequeathed to 
them the exclusive right of publishing their 
own works, even for half a century after their 
own death. Look at the classics. What count- 
less sums have been realized by the booksellers 
and publishers from the successive reprints, in 
every country of Europe, of the works of Livy, 
Cicero, and Tacitus, since the revival of letters 
three hundred years ago 1 Why, the profits 
made by the publication of any one of these 
works would have made a princely fortune, 
and founded a ducal family. So true is it that 
literary or philosophical talent of the highest 
description, so far from being unproductive of 
wealth to its possessors, is in the end produc- 
tive of a far greater and more lasting source 
of income than the efforts either of the lawyer, 
the merchant, or the statesman. It has this 
invaluable quality: it is permanent; it creates 
an estate which produces fruits after the author 
is no more. The only reason why great for- 
tunes are not made in the one way as well as 
in the other, is because the labour employed 
on that, the highest species of human adven- 
ture, is almost always unproductive in the out- 
set, and lucrative only in the end ; and that the 
injustice of human laws confiscates the pro- 
perty at the very moment when the crop is beginning 
to come to maturity. They know little of human 
nature who imagine that such prospect of 
remote advantage would have little influence 
on literary exertion. Look at life insurances. 
How large a proportion of the most active and 
useful members of society, especially among 
the middle and higher classes, are connected 
with these admirable institutions. How many 
virtuous and industrious men deny themselves, 
during a long life, many luxuries, and even 
comforts, in order that, after their death, they 
may bequeath an independence to their chil- 
dren. Eighty thousand persons are now con- 
nected with these institutions in Great Britain, 
and that number is hourly on the increase. 
Here, then, is decisive evidence of the ex- 
tent to which the desire of transmitting in- 
dependence to our children acts upon man- 
kind, even where it is to be won only by a life 
of continued toil and self-denial. Can there 
be the slightest doubt that the same motive, 
combining with the desire to benefit mankind, 
or acquire durable fame, would soon come to 
operate powerfully upon the highest class of 
intellectual effort, and that an adequate coun- 
teraction would thus be provided to the nume- 
roi ls attractions which now impel it into tem- 
porary exertion 1 And observe, the motives 
Avhich lead to present self-denial in order to 
transmit an independence to posterity, by the 
effecting life assurances, are nearly allied to 



those which prompt great minds to magnani- 
mous and durable efforts for the good of their 
species ; for both rest upon the foundation of 
all that is noble or elevated in human affairs — 
a denial of self, a regard to futurity, and a love 
for others. 

The tenacity with which any extension even 
of the term of copyright enjoyed by authors, 
or their assignees, is resisted by a certain por- 
tion of the London booksellers, and those who 
deal in the same line, affords the most decisive 
proof of the magnitude of the profits which 
are to be obtained by the republication, the 
moment the copyright has expired, of works 
that have acquired a standard reputation, and 
of the vast amount of literary property, the 
inheritance of the great of the past age, which 
is annually confiscated for the benefit of the 
booksellers in the present. These men look 
to the matter as a mere piece of mercantile 
speculation; their resistance is wholly founded 
upon the dread of a diminution of their profits, 
wrung from the souls of former authors; they 
would never have put forward, with so much 
anxiety as they have done, Mr. Warburton and 
Mr. Wakiey to fight their battles, if they had 
not had very extensive profits to defend in the 
contest. The vehemence of their opposition 
affords a measure of the magnitude of the in- 
justice which is done to authors by the present 
state of the law, and of the amount of en- 
couragement to great and glorious effort, which 
is annually withheld by the legislature. The 
struggle, in which they have hitherto proved 
successful, is not a contest between authors 
and a particular section of the booksellers; it 
is, in reality, a contest between the nation and 
a limited section of the bookselling trade. It 
is, in the most emphatic sense, a class against 
a national interest. For on the one side are a 
few London booksellers who make colossal 
fortunes, by realizing, shortly after their de- 
cease, the profits of departed greatness; and 
on the other, the whole body of the people of 
England, whose opinions and character are 
necessarily formed by the highest class of its 
writers, and whose national destiny and future 
fate is mainly dependent upon the spirited and 
exalted direction of their genius. 

The only argument founded upon public 
considerations which is ever adduced against 
these views, is founded upon the assertion, 
that, under the monopoly produced by the copy- 
right to the author, while it lasts, the price of 
works is seriously enhanced to the public, and 
they are confined to editions of a more costly 
description, and that thus the benefit of the 
spread of knowledge among the middle and 
humbler classes is diminished. If this argu- 
ment were well founded, it may be admitted, 
that it would afford, to a certain degree, a coun- 
terbalancing consideration to those which have 
been mentioned, although no temporary or 
passing advantages could ever adequately 
compensate the evils consequent upon drying 
up the fountains of real intellectual greatness 
amongst us. But it is evident that these ap- 
prehensions are altogether chimerical, and that 
the clamour devised about the middle classes 
being deprived of the benefit of getting cheap 
editions of works that have become standard, 



THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION. 



183 



is now altogether unfounded. It may be con- 
ceded that in the former age, when the rich 
and the affluent alone were the purchasers of 
books, and education had not opened the trea- 
sures of knowledge to a larger circle, the price 
of books during the copyright were, in general, 
high, and that the prices were too often suited 
only to the higher class of readers. Nay, it 
may also be admitted, that some publishers 
have often, by the reprint of works of a stand- 
ard nature, at a cheaper rate, the moment the 
copyright expired, of late years materially ex- 
tended the circle of their readers, and thereby 
conferred an important benefit on society. But 
nothing can be plainer than that this circum- 
stance has taken place solely from the recent 
introduction of the middle classes into the 
reading and book-purchasing public; and be- 
cause experience had not yet taught authors 
or publishers the immense profits to be some- 
times realized by adapting, during the con- 
tinuance of the copyright, the varied classes of 
editions of popular works, to the different 
classes of readers who have now risen into 
activity. But their attention is now fully 
awakened to this subject. Every one now 
sees that the greatest profit is to be realized 
during the copyright, for works of durable in- 
terest, by publishing editions adapted for all, 
even the very humblest classes. The proof of this 
is decisive. Does not Mr. Campbell publish 
annually a new edition of the Pleasures of Hope, 
in every possible form, from the two guinea 
edition for the duchess or countess, down to 
the shilling copy for the mechanic and the 
artisan] Have not Sir Walter Scott's Novels 
been brought down, during the subsistence of 
the copyright, to an issue of the Waverley 
Novels, at four shillings each novel, and lat- 
terly to an issue at twopence a week, avowedly 
for the working-classes? Moore's, Southey's, 
and Wordsworth's Poems, have all been pub- 
lished by the authors or their assignees, in a 
duodecimo form, originally at five, but which 
can now be had at four, or three shillings and 
sixpence a volume. James's Naval History has 
already issued from the press in monthly num- 
bers, at five shillings; and the eighth edition 
of Hallam's Middle Ages is before the public in 
two volumes, at a price so moderate, that it 
never can be made lower to those who do not 
wish to put out their eyes by reading closely 
printed double columns by candle-light. In 
short, authors and booksellers now perfectly 
understand that, as a reading and book-buying 
public has sprung up in all classes, it has 
become not only necessary, but in the highest 
degree profitable, to issue different editions 
even simultaneously from the press, if the 
reputation of a work has become fully esta- 



blished, at different prices, adapted to the rates 
at which purchasers may be inclined to buy; 
just as the manager of a theatre understands 
that it is expedient not only to have the dress- 
circle for the nobility and gentry, but the pit 
for the people of business, and the galleries for 
the humbler classes. No doubt can be enter- 
tained that as the craving for intellectual en- 
joyment, to those who feel it the more insatia- 
ble of any, spreads more generally through the 
middle classes, this effect will more extensively 
take place. No one imagines that, because the 
seats in the dress-circle are seven shillings, he 
will close the pit, which is three and sixpence, 
or the gallery, which is one shilling. In this 
age of growing wealth and intelligence in the 
middle and humbler classes, there is no danger 
of their being forgotten, if they do not forget 
themselves. There is more to be got out of 
the pit and the galleries than the dress-circle. 
Thus we have argued this great question of 
copyright upon its true ground — the national 
character, the national interests, the elevation 
and improvement of all classes. We disdain 
to argue it upon the footing of the interests of 
authors; we despise appeals to the humanity, 
even to the justice of the legislature. We 
have not even mentioned the names of Mr. Ser- 
geant Talfourd or Lord Mahon, who have so 
strenuously and eloquently advocated the in- 
terest of authors in the point at issue. We 
have done so because we look to higher objects 
in connection with the question than any per- 
sonal or class advantage. We tell our legis- 
lators, that those who wield the powers of 
thought are fully aware of the strength of the 
lever which they hold in their hand; they 
know that it governs the rulers of men ; that 
it brought on the Revolution of France, and 
stopped the Revolution of England. The only 
class of writers to whom the extension of the 
present copyright would be of any value, are 
actuated by higher motives to their exertions 
than any worldly considerations of honour or 
profit ; those who aspire to direct or bless man- 
kind, are neither to be seduced by courts, nor 
to be won by gold. It is the national cha- 
racter which is really affected by the present 
downward tendency of our literature; it is 
the national interests which are really at stake; 
it is the final fate of the empire which is at 
issue in the character of our literature. True, 
an extension of the copyright will not affect 
the interests of a thousandth part of the writers, 
or a hundredth part of the readers in the pre- 
sent or any future age; but what then— it is 
they who are to form the general opinion of 
mankind in the next; it is upon that thou- 
sandth and that hundredth that the fate of the 
world depends. 



184 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



MICHELET'S TRANCE.* 



It is a common and very just observation, ! the eighteen hundred years which have elapsed 
that modern historical works are not so inte- 1 since the Augustan age of Roman literature — 



resting as those which have been bequeathed 
to us by antiquity. Even at this distance of 
time, after two thousand years have elapsed 
since they were written, the great histories of 
Greece and Rome still form the most attractive 
subject of study to all ages. The young find 
in their heart-stirring legends and romantic 
incidents, keen and intense delight; the mid- 
dle-aged discover in their reflections and max- 
ims the best guide in the ever-changing, but 
yet ever the same, course of human events : 
the aged recur to them with still greater plea- 
sure, as imbodying at once the visions of their 
youth and the experience of their maturer years. 
It is not going too far to assert, that in their 
own style they are altogether inimitable, and 
that, like the Greek statues, future ages, ever 
imitating, will never be able to rival them. 

This remarkable and generally admitted 
perfection is not to be ascribed, however, to any 
superior genius in the ancient to the modern 
writers. History was a different art in Greece 
and Rome from what it now is. Antiquity 
had no romances — their histories, based in 
early times on their ballads and traditions, 
supplied their place. Narrative with them 
was simple in event, and single in interest — 
it related in general the progress of a single 
city or commonwealth ; upon that the whole 
light of the artist required to be thrown : the 
remainder naturally was placed in shade, or 
slightly illuminated only where it came in con- 
tact with the favoured object. With the ex- 
ception of Herodotus, who, though the oldest 
historian in existence, was led by the vigour 
of his mind, his discursive habits, and exten- 
sive travelling, to give, as it were, a picture 
of the whole world then known — these ancient 
histories are all the annals of individual towns 
or little republics. Xenophon, Thucydides, 
Sallust, Livy, Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius 
Halicarnassensis, are all more or less of this 
character. The mighty genius of Tacitus 
alone seems to have embraced the design of 
giving a picture of the vast empire of Rome; 
and even in his hands history was still dis- 
tinguished by its old character — the Forum 
was still the object of reverential interest — the 
Palatine Mount embraced the theatre of almost 
all the revolutions which he has so admirably 
portrayed ; and his immortal work is less a 
picture of the Roman world under the Caesars, 
than a delineation of the revolutions of the 
palace which shook their empire, and the con- 
vulsive throes by which they were attended 
throughout its various provinces. 

In modern times, a far more difficult task 
awaits the historian, and wholly different quali- 
ties are required in him who undertakes to 
perform it. The superior age of the world — 



* Histoire de France. ParM Michelet. 6 vols. Paris, 
1832-3. Foreign and Colonial Review, April, 1S44. 



the discovery of new nations, quarters of the 
globe, and hemispheres, since Livy concluded, 
in one hundred and forty books, the majestic 
annals of Roman victories — the close connec- 
tion of nations among each other, which have 
interlaced their story like the limbs of ancient 
wrestlers — the new sciences which have grown 
up and come to bear upon human events, with 
the growth of mankind and the expansion of 
knowledge — and the prodigious perplexity of 
transactions, military, political, and moral, 
which require to be unravelled and brought in 
a clear form before the mind of the reader, — 
have rendered the task of the historian now as 
laborious, complicated, and confused, as in 
former times it was simple, clear, and undi- 
vided. Unity of effect — that precious and im- 
portant object in all the Fine Arts — has been 
rendered always difficult, sometimes impossi- 
ble. The story is so complicated, the trans- 
actions so various, the interests so diverse, that 
nothing but the most consummate skill, and in- 
cessant attention on the part of the historian 
to the leading objects of his narrative, can 
prevent the mind of the reader from being lost 
in a boundless sea of detached occurrences. 
It is not the " tale of Troy divine," nor the 
narrative of Roman heroism; nor the conquest 
of Jerusalem, which requires to be recorded ; 
but the transactions of many different nations, 
as various and detached from each other as 
the adventures of the knights errant in Ariosto. 
For these reasons history cannot be written 
now on the plan of the ancients, — and if at- 
tempted, it would fail of success. The family 
of nations has become too large to admit of 
interest being centred only on one member of 
it. It is in vain now to draw the picture of the 
groups of time, by throwing the whole light on 
one figure, and all the rest in shade. Equally 
impossible is it to give a mere narrative of 
interesting events, and cast all the rest over- 
board. All the world would revolt at such an 
attempt, if made. The transactions of the one 
selected would be unintelligible, if those of the 
adjoining states were not given. One set of 
readers would say, " Where are your statis- 
tics 1" Another, " There is no military discus- 
sion — the author is evidently no soldier." A 
third would condemn the book as wanting 
diplomatic transactions ; a fourth, as destitute 
of philosophic reflection. The statesman w r ould 
throw it aside as not containing the informa- 
tion he desired ; the scholar, as affording no 
clue to contemporary and original authority; 
the man of the world, as a narrative not to be 
relied on, and to which it was hazardous to 
trust without farther investigation. Women 
would reject it as less interesting than novels ; 
men, as not more authentic than a romance. 

Notwithstanding, however, this great and 
increasing difficulty of writing history in 



MICHELET'S FRANCE. 



185 



modern times, from the vast addition to the 
subjects which it embraces and must embrace, 
the fundamental principles of the art are still 
the same as they were in the days of Thucydi- 
des or Sallust. The figures in the picture are 
greatly multiplied ; many cross lights disturb 
the unity of its effect; infinitely more learning 
is required in the drapery and still life; but 
the object of the painter has undergone no 
change. Unity of effect, singleness of emotion, 
should still be his great aim : the multiplication 
of objects from which it is to be produced, has 
increased the difficulty, but not altered the 
principles of the art. And that this difficulty 
is not insuperable, but may be overcome by 
the light of genius directing the hand of in- 
dustry, is decisively proved by the example of 
Gibbon's Rome, which, embracing the events 
of fifteen centuries, and successive descriptions 
of all the nations which, during that long period, 
took a prominent part in the transactions of 
the world, yet conveys a clear and distinct im- 
pression in every part to the mind of the reader; 
and presents a series of pictures so vivid, and 
drawn with such force, that the work, more 
permanently than any romance, fascinates 
every successive generation. 

It is commonly said that accuracy and im- 
partiality are the chief requisites in an histo- 
rian. That they are indispensable to his utility 
or success, is indeed certain ; for if the im- 
pression once be lost, that the author is to be 
relied on, the value of his production, as a 
record of past events, is at an end. No bril- 
liancy of description, no magic of eloquence, 
no power of narrative, can supply the want of 
the one thing needful — trustworthiness. But 
fully admitting that truth and justice are the 
bases of history, there never was a greater mis- 
take than to imagine that of themselves they 
will constitute an historian. They may make 
a valuable annalist — a good compiler of ma- 
terials ; but very different qualities are re- 
quired in the artist who is to construct the 
edifice. In him we expect the power of com- 
bination, the inspiration of genius, the bril- 
liancy of conception, the generalization ofeftect. 
The workman who cuts the stones out of the 
quarry, or fashions and dresses them into en- 
tablatures and columns, is a very different man 
from him who combines them into the temple, 
the palace, or the cathedral. The one is a 
tradesman, the other an artist — the first a 
quarrier, the last a Michael Angelo. 

Mr. Fox arranged the arts of composition 
thus : — 1. Poetry ; 2. History ; 3. Orator}'. That 
very order indicated that the great orator had 
a just conception of the nature of history, and 
possessed many of the qualities requisite to 
excel in it, as he did in the flights of eloquence. 
It is, in truth, in its higher departments, one 
of the fine arts; and it is the extraordinary 
difficulty of finding a person who combines the 
imagination and fervour requisite for emi- 
nence in their aerial visions, with the industry 
and research which are indispensable for the 
correct narrative of earthly events, which 
renders great historians so very rare, even in 
the most brilliant periods of human existence. 
Antiquity only produced six; modern times 
can hardly boast of eight. It is much easier 
24 



to find a great epic than a great history ; there 
were many poets in antiquity, but only one 
Tacitus. Homer himself is rather an annalist 
than a poet: it is his inimitable traits of na- 
ture which constitute his principal charm : the 
Iliad is a history in verse. Modern Italy can 
boast of a cluster of immortal poets and paint- 
ers ; but the country of Raphael and Tasso has 
not produced one really great history. The 
laboured annals of Guicciardini or Davila can- 
not bear the name; a work, the perusal of 
which was deemed worse than the fate of a 
galley-slave, cannot be admitted to take its 
place with the master-pieces of Italian art.* 
Three historians only in Great Britain have 
by common consent taken their station in the 
highest rank of historic excellence. Sismondi 
alone, in France, has been assigned a place 
by the side of Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson. 
This extraordinary rarity of the highest excel- 
lence demonstrates the extraordinary difficulty 
of the art, and justifies Mr. Fox's assertion, 
that it ranks next to poetry in the fine arts; 
but it becomes the more extraordinary, when 
the immense number of works written on his- 
torical subjects is taken into consideration, 
and the prodigious piles of books of history 
which are to be met with in every public 
library. 

The greatest cause of this general failure 
of historical works to excite general attention, 
or acquire lasting fame, is the want of power 
of generalization and classification in the 
writers. Immersed in a boundless sea of de- 
tails, of the relative importance of which they 
were unable to form any just estimate, the au- 
thors of the vast majority of these works have 
faithfully chronicled the events which fell un- 
der their notice, but in so dry and uninterest- 
ing a manner that they produced no sort of 
impression on mankind. Except as books of 
antiquity or reference, they have long since 
been consigned to the vault of all the Ca- 
pulets. They were crushed under their own 
weight — they were drowned in the flood of 
their own facts. While they were straining 
every nerve not to deceive their readers, the 
whole class of those readers quietly slipped 
over to the other side. They, their merits and 
their faults, were alike forgotten. It may safely 
be affirmed, that ninety-nine out of a hundred 
historical works are consigned to oblivion 
from this cause. 

The quality, on the other hand, which dis- 
tinguishes all the histories which have acquired 
a great and lasting reputation among men, has 
been the very reverse of this. It consists in 
the power of throwing into the shade the sub- 
ordinate and comparatively immaterial facts, 
and bringing into a prominent light those only 
on which subsequent ages love to dwell, from 
the heroism of the actions recounted, the tragic 
interest of the catastrophes portrayed, or the 
important consequences with which they have 
been attended on the future generations of 
men. It was thus that Herodotus painted with 

* It is reported in Italy, that a galley-slave was offer- 
ed a commutation of his sentence, if he would read 
through Guicciardini's War of Florence with Pisa. After 
labouring at it for some time, he petitioned to be sent 
back to the oar — Si non £ vera & bene trdvato. 

a2 



186 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



so much force the memorable events of the 
Persian invasion of Greece; and Thucydides, 
the contest of aristocracy and democracy in 
the Greek commonwealths; and Livy, the im- 
mortal strife of Hannibal and Scipio in Roman 
story. No historian ever equalled Gibbon in 
this power of classification, and giving breadth 
of effect; for none ever had so vast and com- 
plicated a series of events to recount, and none 
ever portrayed them with so graphic and lu- 
minous a pen. Observe his great pictures : — 
the condition of the Roman empire in the time 
of Augustus — the capture of Constantinople by 
the Latin crusaders — the rise of Mohammed — 
the habiis and manners of the pastoral nations 
— the disasters of Julian — and the final decay 
and ruin of the Eternal City. They stand out 
from the canvas with all the freshness and 
animation of real life ; and seizing powerfully 
on the imagination of the reader, they make an 
indelible impression, and compensate or cause 
to be forgotten all the insignificant details of 
revolutions in the palace of Constantinople, or 
in the decline of the Roman empire, which 
necessarily required to be introduced. 

Struck with the fate of so prodigious a host 
of historical writers, who had sunk into obli- 
vion from this cause, Voltaire, with his usual 
vigour and originality, struck out a new style 
in this department of literature. Discarding 
at once the whole meager details, the long de- 
scriptions of dress and ceremony, which filled 
the pages of the old chronicles or monkish 
annalists, he strove to bring history back to 
what he conceived, and with reason, was its 
true object — a striking delineation of the prin- 
cipal events which had occurred, with a picture 
of thechanges of manners, ideas, and principles 
with which they were accompanied. This was 
a great improvement on the jejune narratives 
of former times ; and proportionally great was 
the success with which, in the first instance at 
least, it was attended. While the dry details of 
Guicciardini, the ponderous tomes of Villaret 
or Mezera)', and the trustworthy quartos of De 
Thou, slumbered in respectable obscurity on the 
dusty shelves of the library, the " Siecle de Louis 
XIV.," the Life of Peter the Great and Charles 
XII., were on every table, and almost in every 
boudoir; and their popular author was elevated 
to the pinnacle of worldly fame, while his more 
laborious and industrious predecessors were 
nigh forgotten by a frivolous age. A host of 
imitators, as usual with every original writer, 
followed in this brilliant and lucrative path ; of 
whom, Raynal in France, Schiller in Germany, 
and Watson in England, were the most suc- 
cessful. 

But it was ere long discovered that this bril- 
liant and sketchy style of history was neither 
satisfactory to the scholar nor permanently 
popular with the public. It was amusing ra- 
ther than interesting, brilliant than profound. 
Its ingenious authors sprung too suddenly to 
conclusions — they laid down positions which 
the experience of the next age proved to be er- 
roneous. It wanted that essential requisite in 
history, a knowledge of the human heart and a 
practical acquaintance with men. Above all, 
it had none of the earnestness of thought, the 
impassioned expression, which springs from 



deep and sincere conviction, and which is ever 
found to be the only lasting passport to the hu- 
man heart. After the first burst of popularity 
was over, it began to be discovered that these 
brilliant sketches were not real history, and 
could never supply its place. They left an im- 
mense deal untold, of equal or greater import- 
ance than what was told. They gave an 
amusing, but deceptive, and therefore not per- 
manently interesting, account of the periods they 
embraced. Men design something more in 
reading the narrative of great and important 
events in past times, than an able sketch of 
their leading features and brilliant characters, 
accompanied by perpetual sneers at priests, 
eulogies on kings, or sarcasms on mankind. 
This was more particularly the case when the 
political contests of the 18th century increased 
in vehemence, and men, warmed with the pas- 
sions of real life, turned back to the indifferent 
coolness, the philosophic disdain, the ton deri- 
soire, with which the most momentous or tragic 
events had been treated in these gifted but su- 
perficial writers. Madame de Stael has said, 
that when derision has become the prevailing 
characteristic of the public mind, it is all over 
with the generous affections or elevated senti- 
ments. She was right, but not for ever — only 
till men are made to feel in their own persons 
the sufferings they laugh at in others. It is 
astonishing how soon that turns derision into 
sympathy. The " aristocrats derisoircs" emerged 
from the prisons of Paris, on the fall of Robes- 
pierre, deeply affected with sympathy for hu- 
man wo. 

The profound emotions, the dreadful suffer- 
ings, the heart-stirring interest of that eventful 
era, speedily communicated themselves to the 
style of historical writers; it at once sent the 
whole tribe of philosophic and derisory histo- 
rians overboard. The sketchy style, the philo- 
sophic contempt, the calm indifference, the 
skeptical sneers of Voltaire and his followers, 
were felt as insupportable by those who had 
known what real suffering was. There early 
appeared in the narratives of the French Revo- 
lution, accordingly, in the works of Toulon- 
geon, Bertrand de Molleville, the Deux Amis 
de la Liberte, and Lacretelle, a force of paint- 
ing, a pathos of narrative, a vehemence of lan- 
guage, which for centuries had been unknown 
in modern Europe. This style speedily became 
general, and communicated itself to history in 
all its branches. The passions on all sides were 
too strongly roused to permit of the calm nar- 
ratives of former philosophic writers being 
tolerated; men had suffered too much to allow 
them to speak or think with indifference of the 
sufferings of others. In painting with force 
and energy, it was soon found that recourse 
must be had to the original authorities, and, if 
possible, the eye-witnesses of the events ; all 
subsequent or imaginary narrative appeared 
insipid and lifeless in comparison ; it was like 
studying the mannerist trees of Perelle or 
Vivares after the vigorous sketches from na- 
ture of Salvator or Claude. Thence has 
arisen the great school of modern French his- 
tory, of which Sismondi was the founder ; and 
which has since been enriched by the works 
of Guizot, Thierry, Barante, Thiers, Mignet. 



MICHELET'S FRANCE. 



187 



Michaud, and Michelet : a cluster of writers, 
which, if none of them singly equal the master- 
pieces of English history, present, taken as a 
whole, a greater mass of talent in that depart- 
ment than any other country can boast. 

The poetical mind and pictorial eye of Gib- 
bon had made him anticipate, in the very midst 
of the philosophic school of Voltaire, Hume, 
and Robertson, this great change which mis- 
fortune and suffering impressed generally upon 
the next generation. Thence his extraordinary 
excellence and acknowledged superiority as a 
delineator of events to any writer who has pre- 
ceded or followed him. He united the philo- 
sophy and general views of one age to the 
brilliant pictures and impassioned story of 
another. He warmed with the narratives of 
the crusaders or the Saracens — he wandered 
with the Scythians — he wept with the Greeks 
— he delineated with a painter's hand, and a 
poet's fire, the manners of the nations, the fea- 
tures of the countries, the most striking events 
of the periods which were passed under review ; 
but at the same time he preserved inviolate 
the unity and general effect of his picture, — 
his lights and shadows maintained their just 
proportions, and were respectively cast on the 
proper objects. Philosophy threw a radiance 
over the mighty maze ; and the mind of the 
reader, after concluding his prodigious series 
of details, dwelt with complacency on its most 
striking periods, skilfully brought out by the 
consummate skill of the artist,as the recollection 
of a spectator does on any of the magic scenes 
in Switzerland, in which, amidst an infinity of 
beautiful objects, the eye is fascinated by the 
calm tranquillity of the lake, or the rosy hues of 
the evening glow on the glacier. We speak of 
Gibbon as a delineator of events; none can 
feel more strongly or deplore more deeply the 
fatal blindness — the curse of his age — which 
rendered him so perverted on the subject of 
religion, and left so w r ide a chasm in his im- 
mortal w r ork, which the profounder thought 
and wider experience of Guizot has done so 
much to fill. 

Considered as calm and philosophic narra- 
tives, the histories of Hume and Robertson 
will remain as standard models for every fu- 
ture age. The just and profound reflections 
of the former, the inimitable clearness and im- 
partiality with which he has summoned up 
the arguments on both sides, on the most mo- 
mentous questions which have agitated Eng- 
land, as well as the general simplicity, uniform 
clearness and occasional pathos of his story, 
must for ever command the admiration of 
mankind. In vain we are told that he is often 
inaccurate, sometimes partial ; in vain are 
successive attacks published on detached parts 
of his narrative, by party zeal or antiquarian 
research; his reputation is undiminished; 
successive editions issuing from the press 
attest the continued sale of his work; and it 
continues its majestic course through the sea 
of time, like a mighty three-decker, which 
never even condescends to notice the javelins 
darted at its sides from the hostile canoes 
which from time to time seek to impede its 
progress. 

Robertson's merits are of a different, and 



upon the whole, of an inferior kind. Gifted 
with a philosophic spirit, a just and equal 
mind, an eloquent and impressive expression, 
he had not the profound sagacity, the penetrat- 
ing intellect, which have rendered the obser- 
vation of Bacon, Hume, and Johnson as endur- 
ing as the English language. He had not 
enjoyed the practical acquaintance with man, 
which Hume acquired by mingling in diplo- 
macy ; and without a practical acquaintance 
with man, no writer, whatever his abilities 
may be, can rightly appreciate the motives, or 
probable result of human actions. It was this 
practical collision with public affairs which 
has rendered the histories of Thucydides, Sal- 
lust, and Tacitus so profoundly descriptive of 
the human heart. Living alternately in the 
seclusion of a Scotch manse, or at the head of 
a Scotch university, surrounded by books, re- 
spect, and ease, the reverend Principal took an 
agreeable and attractive, but often incorrect 
view of human affairs. In surveying the ge- 
neral stream of human events, and drawing 
just conclusions regarding the changes of 
centuries, he was truly admirable; and in 
those respects his first volume of " Charles V.' y 
may, if we except Guizot's " Civilisation Eu- 
ropeen," be pronounced without a parallel in 
the whole annals of literature. The brilliant 
picture, too, which he has left of the discovery 
of America, and the manner of the savage 
tribes which then inhabited that continent, 
proves that he was not less capable of wield- 
ing the fascination of description and romance. 
But in narrating political events, and diving 
into the mysteries of human motives, his want 
of practical acquaintance with man is at once 
apparent. He described the human heart from 
hearsay, not experience; — he was an historian 
by reading, not observation. We look in vain 
in his pages for a gallery of historical portraits, 
to be placed beside the noble one which is to 
be found in Clarendon. As little can we find 
in them any profound remarks, like those of 
Bacon, Hume, or Tacitus, the justice of which 
is perpetually brought home by experience to 
every successive generation of men. His re- 
putation, accordingly, is sensibly declining; and 
though it will never become extinct, it is easy 
to foresee that it is not destined to maintain, 
in future times, the colossal proportions which 
it at first acquired. 

Both Hume and Robertson, however, left 
untouched one fertile field of historic interest 
which Herodotus and Gibbon had cultivated 
with such success. This is the geographical 
field, the description of countries, as well as men 
and manners. It is surprising wha variety 
and interest this gives to historical narrative ; 
how strongly it fixes places and regions in the 
memory of the reader; and how much it aug- 
ments the interest of the story, by filling up 
and clothing in the mind's eye the scenes in 
in which it occurred. Doubtless this must not 
be carried too far ; unquestionably the narra- 
tive of human transactions is the main object 
of history; and the one thing needful, as in fic- 
tion, is to paint the human heart ; but still there, 
as elsewhere in the Fine Arts, variety and con- 
trast contribute powerfully to effect; and amidst 
the incessant maze of villany and suffering 



188 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



which constitutes human transactions, it is 
sometimes refreshing to contemplate for a while 
the calm serenity and indestructible features 
of Nature. 

The modern French historians, forcibly 
struck with the insipidity and tameness of the 
philosophical histories, and fraught with the 
heart-rending recollections and fervent pas- 
sions of the Revolution, have sought to give 
life and animation, as well as fidelity and ac- 
curacy, to their works, by a sedulous recur- 
rence to contemporary annals and authority, 
and an introduction of not only the facts and 
statements, but the ideas and words to be found 
in the ancient chronicles. Hence the habitual 
recurrence to original authority, not only by 
reference at the foot of the page," but by quota- 
tion in the words of the old authors, of the 
actual expressions made use of on the more 
important occasions. There can be no doubt 
that this is in some respects an improvement, 
both with a view to the fidelity and accuracy 
of history; for it at once affords a guarantee 
for the actual examination of originafauthority 
by the writer, provides a ready and immediate 
check on inaccuracy or misrepresentation, 
and renders his work a "Catalogue Raisonne," 
where those who desire to study the subject 
thoroughly, may discover at once where their 
materials are to be found. The works of both 
the Thierrys,* of Barante, Sismondi, and Miche- 
let, are, throughout, constructed on this prin- 
ciple ; and thence, in a great measure, the 
fidelity, spirit, and value of their productions. 
But fully admitting, as we do, the importance 
of this great improvement in the art of histori- 
cal composition, it has its limits ; and writers 
who adopt it will do well to reflect on what 
those limits are. Though founded on fact, 
though based on reality, though dependent for 
its existence on truth, History is still one of 
the Fine Arts. We must ever recollect that 
Mr. Fox assigned it a place next to Poetry, and 
before Oratory. All these improvements in 
the collection and preparation of materials add 
to the solidity and value of the structure, but 
they make no alteration in the principles of its 
composition. However the stones maybe cut 
out of the quarry, however fashioned or carved 
by the skill of the workman, their united effect 
will be entirely lost if they are not put together 
by the conception of a Michael Angelo, a Pal- 
ladio, or a Wren. Genius is still the soul of 
history; its highest inspirations must be de- 
rived from the Muses. The most valuable 
historical works, if not sustained by this divine 
quality, will speedily sink into useful quarries 
or serviceable books of reference. In vain 
does a Utilitarian age seek to discard the in- 
fluence of imagination, and subject thought to 
the deductions of fact and reason, and the 
motives of temporal comfort. The value of 
fancy and ardour of mind, is more strongly 
felt in the narration of real, than even the con- 
ception of fictitious events: for this reason, 
that it is more easy to discard uninteresting 
facts from a romance than render them inte- 



* In the " Histoire de la Conquete de l'Angleterre par 
.es Normands, par Auguste Thierry," and the " Histoire 
Jes Gauloia," and "Histoire des Rois Merovingiens par 
Arnedee Thierry" (brother of Auguste). 



resting in a history. They may be rejected 
altogether in the former; in the latter they 
must be retained. It is easier to throw aside 
a burden than contrive how to bear it. Induc- 
tion may enable the author to sustain the 
weight, but it will never make his reader do so. 
Imagination alone can lighten the burden. It 
is the wings of Genius which must support 
Truth itself through the sea of Time. " Ces 
ouvrages ne sont pas que de l'imagination." 
"De l'imagination!" replied Napoleon, — "He 
bien, c'est l'imagination qui domine le monde." 
This eternal and indestructible superiority 
of genius to all the efforts of industry and in- 
telligence, when unenlightened by its divine 
light, is not only noways inconsistent with the 
most minute acquaintance with facts and sedu- 
lous attention to historic accuracy, but it can 
attain its highest flights only by being founded 
on that basis. Mere imagination and fancy 
will never supply the want of a faithful deline- 
ation of nature. The most inexperienced 
observer has no difficulty in distinguishing the 
one from the other. No great and universal 
reputation was ever gained, either in fiction, 
history, or the arts of imitation, but by a close 
and correct representation of reality. Romance 
rises to its highest flights when it transports 
into the pages of the novelist the incidents, 
thoughts, and characters of real life. History 
assumes its most attractive garb when it clothes 
reality with the true but brilliant colours of 
romance. Look at the other arts. How did 
Homer and Shakspeare compose their immor- 
tal works'? Not by conceiving ideal events 
and characters, the creation only of their own 
prolific imaginations, but by closely observing 
and describing nature, and by giving to their 
characters (albeit cast in the mould of fancy) 
those traits of reality, which, being founded on 
the general and universal feelings of the hu- 
man breast, have spoken with undiminished 
force to every succeeding age. How did 
Raphael and Claude elevate Painting to its 
highest and most divine conceptions, as well 
as its most exquisite and chastened finishing? 
By assiduously copying nature, — by drawing 
every limb, every feature, every branch, every 
sunset, from real scenes, and peopling the 
world of their brilliant imaginations, not with 
new creations, but those objects and those 
images with which in reality all men were 
familiar. True, they moulded them into new 
combinations ; true, they gave them an ex- 
pression, or threw over them a light more 
perfect than any human eye had yet witnessed: 
but that is precisely the task of genius; and 
it is in performing it that its highest excellence 
is attained. It is by moulding reality into the 
expression of imagination, that the greatest tri- 
umphs of art are attained; and he who sepa- 
rates the one from the other will never rise to 
durable greatness in either. 

We are the more inclined to insist on this 
eternal truth, as we perceive in the present style 
of historical composition, both in this country 
and on the continent, unequivocal indications 
of a tendency to lose sight of the great end and 
aim of history, in the anxiety of attaining accu- 
racy in its materials. Again and again we as- 
sert, that such accuracy is the indispensable 



MICHELET'S FRANCE. 



189 



basis of history ; it must form its elements and 
characterize all its parts. But it will not of 
itself form an historian ; it is to history, what 
the sketches from nature in the Liber Veritatis 
are to the inimitable Claudes of the Doria Pa- 
lace at Rome, or the National Gallery in Lon- 
don. Writers in this age have been so forcibly 
struck with the necessity of accuracy in their 
facts, and original drawing in their pictures, 
that they have gone into the opposite extreme ; 
and the danger now is, not so much that they 
will substitute imagination for reality, or 
neglect original drawing in their pictures, as 
that, in their anxiety to preserve the fidelity of 
the sketches from which their pictures are 
taken, they will neglect the principles of their 
composition, and the great ends, moral, poli- 
tical, and religious, of their art. 

This tendency is more particularly conspi- 
cuous in the continental authors; but it is also 
very visible in several justly esteemed histo- 
rical writers of our own country. If you take 
up any of the volumes of Thierry, Barante, 
Michaux, Sismondi, or Michelet, you will find 
the greater part of their pages filled with quo- 
tations from the old chronicles and contempo- 
rary annalists. In their anxiety to preserve 
accuracy of statement and fidelity in narrative, 
they have deemed it indispensable to give, on 
almost all occasions, the very words of their 
original authorities. This is a very great mis- 
take,— and indeed so great a one, that if perse- 
vered in, it will speedily terminate that school of 
historical composition. It is impossible to make 
an harmonious whole, by a selection of passages 
out of a vast mass of original writers of vari- 
ous styles and degrees of merit, and running 
perhaps over a course of centuries. It would 
be just as likely that you could make a perfect 
picture, by dovetailing together bits of mosaic, 
dug up from the ruins of ancient Rome ; or an 
impressive temple, by piling on the top of each 
other, the columns, entablatures, and archi- 
traves of successive structures, raised during 
a course of many centuries. Every composi- 
tion in the fine arts, to produce a powerful im- 
pression, and attain a lasting success, must 
have that unity of expression, which, equally as 
in poetry and the drama, is indispensable to 
the production of emotion or delight in the 
mind of the person to whom it is addressed; 
and unity of expression is to be attained equal- 
ly in ten thousand pages and by recording ten 
thousand facts, as in an epic of Milton, a pic- 
ture of Claude's, or a drama of Sophocles. 

Sharon Turner, Lingard, Tytler, and Hal- 
lam, are most able writers, indefatigable in 
the collection of facts, acute in the analysis of 
authorities, luminous in the deductions they 
have drawn from them. Immense is the addi- 
tion which their labours have made to the real 
and correct annals of the British empire. But 
though many of their episodes are most capti- 
vating, and parts of their works must entrance 
every reader, there is no concealing the fact, 
that their pages are often deficient in interest, 
and are far from possessing the attraction 
which might have been expected from subjects 
of such varied and heart-stirring incident, 
treated by writers of such power of composi- 
tion and learned acquirements. The reason is, 



that they have not regarded history as one of 
the fine arts; they have not studied unity of 
effect, or harmony of composition ; they have 
forgot the place assigned it by Fox, — next to 
poetry in the arts of composition. In the 
search of accuracy, they have sometimes in- 
jured effect ; in the desire to give original words, 
they have often lost originality of thought. 
Their pages are invaluable to the annalist — 
and as books of reference or of value to scho- 
lars they will always maintain a high place in 
our literature; but they will not render hope- 
less, like Livy, Tacitus, or Gibbon, future his- 
tories on the subjects they have treated. From 
the facts they have brought to light, a future 
historian will be able to give a correct detail 
of British story, which, if clothed in the garb 
of imagination, may attain durable celebrity, 
and may possibly come in the end to rival the 
simpler but less truthful narrative of Hume, 
in popularity and interest. 

Colonel Napier's descriptions of battles and 
the heart-stirring events of military warfare 
are superior to any thing in the same style, not 
only in modern but almost in ancient history. 
His account of the battles of Albuera and Sala- 
manca, of the sieges of Badajos and St. Sebas- 
tian, of the actions in the Pyrenees, and the 
struggle of Toulouse, possess a heart-stirring 
interest, a force and energy of drawing, which 
could have been attained only by the eye of 
genius animated by the reminiscences of reali- 
ty. But the great defect of his brilliant work 
is the want of calmness in the judgment of 
political events, and undue crowding in the de- 
tails of his work. He is far too minute in the 
account of inconsiderable transactions. He 
throws the light too equally upon all the figures 
in his canvas; the same fault which charac- 
terizes the home scenes of Wilkie, and will 
render them, with equal, perhaps superior, ge- 
nius, inferior in lasting effect to the paintings 
of Teniers or Gerard Dow. So prodigious is 
the accumulation of detached facts which he 
describes, that the most enthusiastic admirer 
of military narrative is speedily satiated, and 
ordinary readers find their minds so confused 
by the events passed under review, that, with 
the exception of a few brilliant actions and 
sieges, they often close the work without any 
distinct idea of the events which it has so ad- 
mirably recorded. 

This defect is equally conspicuous in the 
pages of M. Michelet. That he is a man not 
merely of extensive and varied reading, but 
fine genius and original thought, is at once ap- 
parent. He states in his preface, and the pe- 
rusal of his work amply justifies the asser- 
tion, "that the most rigid criticism must con- 
cede to him the merit of having drawn his 
narrative entirely from original sources." But 
it were to be wished, that amidst this anxious 
care for the collection of materials, and the 
impress of a faithful and original character 
upon his work, he had been equally attentive 
to the great art of history, viz. the massing 
objects properly together, keeping them in the 
due subordination and perspective which their 
relative importance demands, and conveying 
a distinct impression to the reader's mind 
of the great teras and changes which the va 



190 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



ried story of his subject presents. "Want of 
attention to this has well nigh rendered all the 
rest of no avail. To the learned reader, who is 
previously familiar with the principal events he 
describes, his narrative may convey something 
like a definite idea of the thread of events : 
but how many are they compared to the great 
mass of readers ? Perhaps one in a hundred 
in France — one in five hundred in all other 
countries. The great bulk of readers may 
shut his last volume after the most careful 
perusal, without retaining any distinct recol- 
lection of the course of French History, or 
any remembrance at all of any thing but a 
few highly wrought up and interesting pas- 
sages. This is the great defect of the work, 
arising from want of attention to the due pro- 
portion of objects, and not throwing subordi- 
nate objects sufficiently into the shade. The 
same grievous mistake is conspicuous in 
Mackintosh, Lingard, and Turner's Histories of 
England. It is the great danger of the new or 
graphic school of history; and unless care be 
taken to guard against it, the whole produc- 
tions of that school will be consigned by future 
ages to oblivion. 

We cannot admit that the magnitude or in- 
tricacy of a subject affords any excuse what- 
ever for this defect. Livy did not fall into it 
in recording seven centuries of Roman vic- 
tories ; Gibbon did not fall into it in spanning 
the dark gulf which separates ancient from 
modern times. Claude produced one uniform 
impression, out of an infinity of details,— in 
some of his pieces, solitary and rural— in 
others crowded with harbours, shipping, and 
figures. Gaspar Poussin finished with scru- 
pulous accuracy every leaf in his forest 
scenes; but he managed the light and the 
shade with such exquisite skill, that the charm 
of general effect is produced on the spectator's 
mind. Virgil produces one uniform impres- 
sion from the homely details of his Georgics 
equally as the complicated events of the 
-Eneid. Amidst an infinity of details and 
episodes, Tasso has with consummate skill 
preserved unity of emotion in his Jerusalem 
Delivered : Milton has not lost it even in re- 
cording the events of heaven and earth. Look 
at Nature : — every leaf, every pebble, every 
cliff, every blade of grass, in the most exten- 
sive scene, is finished with that perfection that 
characterizes all her works: yet what majesty 
and generality of effect in the mighty whole ! 
That is the model of historical composition : 
every object should be worked out; nothing 
omitted ; nothing carelessly touched : but a 
bright light should be thrown only on the bril- 
liant events, the momentous changes ; whole 
generations and centuries of monotonous 
events cast into the shade, that is, slightly and 
rapidly passed over; and the most sedulous 
care taken to classify events into periods, in 
such a way as to form so many cells as it 
were in the memory of the reader, wherein to 
deposit the store of information afforded in 
regard to each. 

There is, in truth, only one really great style 
in history, as there is in poetry, painting, or 
music. Superficial observers speak of a new 
6chool of history, or a new mode of treating 



human affairs, as they would of a new plant 
or a new opera: they might as well speak of 
a new style in sculpture or painting, in mathe- 
matics or astronomy, in epic or dramatic 
poetry. We should like to see any one who 
would improve on the style of Phidias and 
Raphael, of Homer and Virgil, of Tasso and 
Milton, of Sophocles or Racine. In inferior 
styles, indeed, there is a very great variety in 
this, as there is in all the other Fine Arts ; but 
in the highest walks there is but one. The 
principles of the whole are the same ; and 
those principles are to produce generality of 
effect out of specialty of objects; to unite fidelity 
of drawing with brilliancy of imagination. 
Observe with what exquisite skill Tasso works 
this uniform impression out of the varied 
events of his "Jerusalem Delivered;" therein 
lies his vast superiority to the endless adven- 
tures of the more brilliant and imaginative 
Ariosto. The principles which regulated the 
compositions of the "Prometheus Vinctus" of 
^Eschylus and the "Hamlet" of Shakspeare 
are the same: the Odes of Pindar are the 
counterparts of those of Gray: the sculpture 
of Phidias and the painting' of Raphael are 
nothing but the same mind working with dif- 
ferent materials. The composition of Gibbon 
is directed by exactly the same principles as 
the sunsets of Claude: the battle-pieces of 
Napier and the banditti of Salvator are fac- 
similes of each other: the episodes of Livy 
and the "Good Shepherds" of Murillo produce 
the same emotions in the breast. Superficial 
readers will deride these observations, and ask 
what has painting external objects to do with 
the narration of human events? We would 
recommend them to spend twenty years in the 
study of either, and they will be at no loss to 
discover in what their analogy consists. 

On this account we cannot admit that history 
is necessarily drier or less interesting than 
poetry or romance. True, it must give a faith- 
ful record of events : true, unless it does so it 
loses its peculiar and highest usefulness ; but 
are we to be told that reality is less attractive 
than fiction ? Are feigned distresses less poig- 
nant than real ones — imaginary virtues less 
ennobling than actual ? The advantage of fic- 
tion consists in the narrower compass which it em- 
braces, and consequently the superior interest 
which it can communicate by working up the 
characters, events, and scenes. That, doubt- 
less, is a great advantage ; but is it beyond the 
reach of history ? May not the leading cha- 
racters and events there be delineated with the 
same force, brilliancy, and fidelity to nature? 
Has it not the additional source of interest 
arising from the events being real? — an inte- 
rest which all who tell stories to children will 
see exemplified in their constant question, "Is 
it true'!" None can see more strongly than 
we do, that the highest aim and first duty of 
history is not to amuse, but to instruct the 
world : and that mere amusement or interest 
are of very secondary importance. But is 
amusement irreconcilable with instruction — 
interest with elevation ? Is not truth best con- 
veyed when it is clothed in an attractive garb? 
Is not the greatest danger which it runs that of 
being superseded by attractive fiction ? How 



MICHELET'S FRANCE. 



191 



many readers are familiar with English history 
through Shakspeare and Scott, rather than 
Hume and Lingard 1 That illustrates the risk 
of leaving truth to its unadorned resources. 
Was it not in parables that Supreme Wis- 
dom communicated itself to mankind 1 The 
wise man will never disdain the aid even of 
imagination and fancy, in communicating in- 
struction. Recollect the words of Napoleon 
— " C'est l'lmagination qui domine le monde." 

We have been insensibly led into these ob- 
servations by observing in what manner Sis- 
mondi, Thierry, Barante, Michelet, and indeed 
all the writers of the antiquarian and graphic 
school, have treated the history of France. 
They are all men of powerful talent, brilliant 
imagination, unbounded research, and philo- 
sophic minds : their histories are so superior 
to any which preceded them, that, in reading 
them, we appear to be entering upon a new 
and hitherto unknown world. But it is in the 
very richness of their materials — the extent of 
their learning — the vast stores of original ideas 
and authority they have brought to bear on the 
annals of the monarchy of Clovis — that we 
discern the principal defect of their compo- 
sitions. They have been well nigh over- 
whelmed by the treasures which themselves 
have dug up. So vast is the mass of original 
documents which they have consulted — of de- 
tails and facts which they have brought to 
light — that they have too often lost sight of the 
first rule in the art of history — unity of com- 
position. They have forgotten the necessity 
of a distinct separation of events in such a 
manner as to impress the general course of 
time upon the mind of their readers. They 
are accurate, graphic, minute in details ; but 
the " tout ensemble" is too often forgotten, and 
the Temple of History made up rather of a 
chaos of old marbles dug up from the earth, 
and piled on each other without either order or 
symmetry, than of the majestic proportions 
and colossal masses of the Pantheon or St. 
Peter's. 

The annals of no country are more distinctly 
separated into periods than those of France : 
in none has the course of events more clearly 
pointed out certain resting places, at which 
the historian may pause to show the progress 
of civilization and the growth of the nation. 
The first origin of the Gauls, and their social 
organization, before the conquest of the Ro- 
mans — their institutions under those mighty 
conquerors, and the vast impress which their 
wisdom and experience, not less than their 
oppression and despotism, communicated to 
their character and habits — the causes which 
led to the decay of the empire of the Csesars, 
and let in the barbarians as deliverers rather 
than enemies into its vast provinces — the es- 
tablishment of the monarchy of Clovis by these 
rude conquerors, and its gradual extension 
from the Rhine to the Pyrenees— the decay of 
the Merovingian dynasty, and the prostration 
of government under the " Rois Faineans" — the 
rise of the "Maires de Palais," and their final 
establishment on the throne by the genius of 
Charlemagne — the rapid fall of his successors, 
and the origin of the Bourbon dynasty, con- 
temporary with the Plantagenets of England — 



the crusades, with their vast effects, moral, 
social, and political, on the people and insti- 
tutions of the country, and the balance of 
power among the different classes of society — 
the expulsion of the English by the ability of 
Philip Augustus, and the restoration of one 
monarchy over the whole of France — the 
frightful atrocities of the religious war against 
the Albigeois — the dreadful wars with England, 
which lasted one hundred and twenty years, 
from Edward III. to Henry V., with their im- 
mediate effect, analogous to that of the Wars 
of the Roses on this side of the Channel, in 
destroying the feudal powers of the nobility — 
the consequent augmentation of the power of 
the crown by the standing army of Charles 
VII. — the indefatigable activity and state 
policy of Louis XI. — the brilliant but ephe- 
meral conquests of Italy by the rise and pro- 
gress of Charles IX. — the rivalry of Francis I. 
and Charles V. — the religious wars, with their 
desolating present effects, and lasting ultimate 
consequences — the deep and Machiavelian 
policy of Cardinal Richelieu, and its entire suc- 
cess in concentrating the whole influence and 
power of government in Paris — the brilliant asra 
of Louis XIV., with its Augustan halo, early 
conquests, and ultimate disasters — the corrup- 
tions of the Regent Orleans and Louis XV. — 
the virtues, difficulties, and martyrdom of Louis 
XVI. — the commencement of the cera of Revo- 
lutions, ending in the fanaticism of Robes- 
pierre and the carnage of the Empire — form 
a series of events and periods, spanning over 
the long course of eighteen centuries, and 
bringing down the annals of mankind from the 
Druids of Gaul and woods of Germany, to the 
intellect of La Place and the glories of Na- 
poleon. 

To exhibit such a picture to the mind's eye 
in its just colours, due proportions, and real 
light — to trace so long a history fraught with 
such changes, glories, and disasters — to unfold, 
through so vast a progress, the unceasing de- 
velopment of the human mind, and simulta- 
neously with it the constant punishment of hu- 
man iniquity, — is indeed a task worthy of the 
greatest intellect which the Almighty has ever 
vouchsafed to guide and enlighten mankind. 
It will never be adequately performed but by 
one mind : there is a unity which must pervade 
every great work of history, as of all the other 
Fine Arts ; a succession of different hands 
breaks the thread of thought and mars the 
uniformity of effect as much in recording the 
annals of centuries, as in painting the passions 
of the heart, or the beauties of a single scene 
in nature. That it is not hopeless to look for 
such a mind is evident to all who recollect 
how Gibbon has painted the still wider ex- 
panse, and traced the longer story, of "The 
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire :" but 
how often in a century does a Gibbon appear 
in the world ! 

In the outset of this noble task, Michelet 
has displayed very great ability; and the 
defects, as it appears to us, of his work, as 
it proceeds, strikingly illustrate the dangers 
to which the modern and graphic style of his- 
tory is exposed. He is admirable, equally 
with Sismondi, Thierry, and Guizot, in the de 



192 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



scription of the condition of Gaul under the 
Romans, and the causes which paralysed the 
strength, and at length overthrew the power, 
of the empire of the Caesars. With a discri- 
minating eye, and a master's hand, he has 
drawn the different character of the Celtic and 
German races of mankind, and the indelible 
impress which they have severally communi- 
cated to their descendants. The early settle- 
ment of the German tribes in Gaul, and the 
amalgamation of the victorious savage with 
the vanquished civilized race, is drawn in the 
spirit of a philosopher, and with a graphic 
power. If he had continued the work as it 
was thus begun, it would have left nothing to 
be desired. 

But when he comes down to later times, and 
above all when he becomes involved in the 
endless maze and minute details of the Chroni- 
cles and early French Memoirs, the work as- 
sumes a different character. Though you still, 
in occasional expressions, see the reflections 
of the philosopher — in frequent pictures, the 
eye of the painter — yet the narrative in gene- 
ral is flooded by an ocean of details. Fatigued 
with the endless maze of intrigues, wars, 
tumults, tortures, crusades, and crimes, which 
succeed one another in rapid succession, the 
reader in despair shuts the volume, with hardly 
any recollection of the thread of events. He 
recollects only that almost all the kings appear 
to have been wicked, almost all the nobles 
ambitious, almost all the priests cruel, almost 
ail the people ferocious. There is nothing 
which tends so strongly to make us satisfied 
with our own lot, and inclined to return thanks 
to Heaven for having cast it in our age, as 
the study of the crimes, disasters, and sufferings 
sufferings of those which have preceded it. 

But still "the mighty maze is not without 
a plan." In the midst of these hideous crimes 
and atrocities, of this general anguish and 
suffering, fixed laws were operating, a silent 
progress was going forward, and Providence 
was patiently and in silence working out its 
ultimate designs by the free agency of an in- 
finity of separate individuals. A great system 
of moral retribution was unceasingly at work ; 
and out of the mingled virtues and vices, joys 
and sorrows, crimes and punishment, of pre- 
vious centuries, were slowly forming the ele- 
ments of the great and glorious French mo- 
narchy. It is in the development of this 
magnificent progress, and in the power of 
exhibiting it in lucid colours to the eye of the 
spectator, that Michelet is chiefly deficient in 
his later volumes. This seems at first sight 
inexplicable, as in the earlier ones, relating to 
Gaul under the Romans, the settlement of the 
Franks, and the early kings of the Merovingian 
race, his powers of generalization and philoso- 
phic observation are eminently conspicuous. 
They form, accordingly, by much the most inte- 
resting and instructive part of his history. But 
a closer examination will at once unfold the 
cause of this difference, and point to the chief 
changes of the graphic and antiquarian school 
of history. He generalized in the earlier vo- 
lumes, because his materials were scanty; he 
has not done so in the later ones, because they 
were redundant. In the first instance, he saw 



objects at a distance in their just proportions ; 
and, not being distracted with details, he threw 
broad lights and shadows over their great fea- 
tures ; in the last, the objects were so near the 
eye, and the lights so perplexed and frequent, 
that he has in some degree lost sight of all ge- 
neral effect in his composition, or at least failed 
in conveying any lucid impression to the 
reader's mind. 

In common with all later writers who have 
observed much or thought deeply on human 
affairs, M. Michelet is a firm believer in the 
inherent and indelible influence of race, both 
on the character and destiny of nations. His 
observations on this subject, especially on the 
peculiarities of the Celtic race, and their vital 
difference from the German, form one of the 
most interesting and valuable parts of his 
work. He traces the same character through 
the Scotch Highlanders, the mountaineers of 
Cumberland and Wales, the native Irish, the 
inhabitants of Brittany, and the mountaineers 
of Gascony and Beam. On the other hand, 
the same national characteristics may be ob- 
served in the German race, under whatever 
climate and circumstances ; in Saxony as in 
England; in the Swiss mountains as in the 
Dutch marshes ; in the crowded marts of Flan- 
ders as in the solitude of the American forest. 
Of the inherent character of the Celtic race, 
he gives the following animated description : — 

"The mixed races of Celts who are called 
French, can be rightly understood only by a 
study of the pure Celts, the Bretons and Welsh, 
the Scotch Highlanders and Irish peasants. 
While France, undergoing the yoke of repeat- 
ed invasion, is marching through successive 
ages from slavery to freedom, from disgrace 
to glory, the old Celtic races, perched on their 
native mountains, or sequestered in their far 
distant isles, have remained faithful to the 
poetic independence of their barbarous life, 
till surprised by the rude hand of foreign con- 
quest. It was in this state that England sur- 
prised, overwhelmed them ; — vainly, however, 
has the Anglo-Saxon pressed upon them — 
they repel his efforts as the rocks of Brittany 
or Cornwall the surges of the Atlantic. The 
sad and patient Judea, which numbered its 
ages by its servitude, has not been more stern- 
ly driven from Asia. But such is the tenacity 
of the Celtic race, such the principle of life in 
nations, that they have endured every outrage, 
and still preserve inviolate the manners and 
customs of their forefathers. Race of granite ! 
Immovable, like the huge Druidical blocks 
which they still regard with superstitious vene- 
ration. 

" One might have expected that a race which 
remained for ever the same, while all was 
changing around it, would succeed in the end 
in conquering by the mere inert force of re- 
sistance, and would impress its character on 
the world. The very reverse has happened, — 
the more the race has been isolated, the more 
it has fallen into insignificance. To remain 
original, to resist all foreign intermixture, to 
repel all the ideas or improvements of the 
stranger, is to remain weak and isolated in the 
world. There is the secret of the Celtic race — 
there is the key to their whole history. It has 



MICHELET'S FRANCE. 



193 



never had but one idea, — it has communicated 
that to other nations, but it has received none 
from them. From age to age it has remained 
strong but limited, indescribable but humili- 
ated, the enemy of the human race, and its 
eternal stain. Woful obstinacy of individual- 
ity, which proudly rests on itself alone, and 
repels all community with the rest of the world. 

" The genius of the Celts, and above all of 
the Gauls, is vigorous and fruitful, strongly 
inclined to material enjoyments, to pleasure 
and .sensuality. The pleasures of sex have 
ever exercised a powerful influence over them. 
They are still the most prolific of the human 
race. In France, the Vert Galant is the true 
national king. We know how marvellously 
the native Irish have multiplied and overflow- 
ed all the adjoining states. It was a common 
occurrence in Brittany, during the middle 
ages, for a seigneur to have a dozen wives. 
They constantly praised themselves, and sent forth 
their sons fearless to battle. Universally, 
among the Celtic nations, bastards succeeded, 
even among kings, as chief of the clan. Woman, 
the object of desire, the mere sport of volup- 
tuousness, never attained the dignified rank 
assigned to her among nations of the German 
descent. 

" No people recorded in history have resist- 
ed so stubbornly as the Celts. The Saxons 
were conquered by the Normans in a single 
battle ; but Cambria contended two hundred 
years with the stranger. Their hopes sustain 
them after their independence is lost: an un- 
conquerable will is the character of their race. 
While awaiting the day of its resurrection, it 
alternately sings and weeps: its chants are 
mingled with tears, as those of the Jews, when 
by the waters of Babylon they sat down and 
wept. The few fragments of Ossian which 
can really be relied on as ancient, have a 
melancholy character. Even our Bretons, 
though they have less reason to lament than 
the rest of the race, are sad and mournful in 
their ideas ; their sympathy is with the Night, 
with Sorrow, with Death. ' I never sleep,' 
says a Breton proverb, 'but I die a bitter 
death.' To him who walks over a tomb they 
say, ' Withdraw from my domain.' They 
have little reason to be gay; all has conspired 
against them : Brittany and Scotland have at- 
tached themselves to the weaker side, to causes 
which were lost. The power of choosing its 
monarchs has been taken from the Celtic race 
since the mysterious stone, formerly brought 
from Ireland into Scotland, has been transport- 
ed to Westminster. 

"Ireland ! Poor first-born of the Celtic race ! 
So far from France, yet its sister, whom it 
cannot succour across the waves ! The Isle of 
Saints — the Emerald Isle — so fruitful in men, 
so bright in genius ! — the country of Berkeley 
and Toland, of Moore andO'Connell ! — the land 
of bright thought and the rapid sword, which 
preserves, amidst the old age of this world, its 
poetic inspiration. Let the English smile 
when, in passing some hovel in their towns, 
they hear the Irish widow chant the coronach 
for her husband. Weep ! mournful country ; 
and let France too weep, for degradation which 
she cannot prevent — calamities which she 
25 



cannot avert! In vain have four hundred 
thousand Irishmen perished in the service of 
France. The Scotch Highlanders will ere 
long disappear from the face of the earth; the 
mountains are daily depopulating; the great 
estates have ruined the land of the Gaul as 
they did ancient Italy. The Highlander will 
ere long exist only in the romances of Walter 
Scott. The tartan and the claymore excite 
surprise in the streets of Edinburgh : they 
disappear — they emigrate ; their national airs 
will ere long be lost, as the music of the Eolian 
harp when the winds are hushed. 

"Behind the Celtic world, the old red gra- 
nite of the European formation has arisen — a 
new world, with different passions, desires, 
and destinies. Last of the savage races 
which overflowed Europe, the Germans were 
the first to introduce the spirit of independence; 
the thirst for individual freedom. That bold and 
youthful spirit — that youth of man, who feels 
himself strong and free in a world which he 
appropriates to himself in anticipation — in 
forests of which he knows not the bounds — on 
a sea which wafts him to unknown shores — 
that spring of the unbroken horse which bears 
him to the Steppes and the Pampas — all 
worked in Alaric, when he swore that an un- 
known force impelled him to the gates of 
Rome; they impelled the Danish pirate when 
he rode on the stormy billow; they animated 
the Saxon outlaws when under Robin Hood 
they contended for the laws of Edward the 
Confessor against the Norman barons. That 
spirit of personal freedom, of unbounded in- 
dividual pride, shines in all their writings — it 
is the invariable characteristic of the German 
theology and philosophy. From the day, when, 
according to the beautiful German fable, the 
' Wat-gits' scattered the dust on all his rela- 
tions, and threw the grass over his shoulder, 
and resting on his staff, overleapt the frail pa- 
ternal enclosure, and let his plume float to the 
wind — from that moment he aspired to the em- 
pire of the world. He deliberated with Attila 
whether he should overthrow the empire of the 
east or west; he aspired with England to over- 
spread the western and southern hemispheres. 

"It is from this mingled spirit of poetry and 
adventure, that the whole idealism of the Ger- 
mans has taken its rise. In their robust race 
is combined the heroic spirit and the wander- 
ing instinct — they unite alone the 'Iliad' and 
' Odyssey' of modern times — gold and women 
were the objects of their early expeditions; 
but these objects had nothing sensual or de- 
grading in them. Woman was the companion, 
the support of man ; his counsel in difficulty, 
his guardian angel in war. Her graces, her 
charms, consisted in her courage, her con- 
stancy. Educated by a man — by a warrior — 
the virgin was early accustomed to the use of 
arms — 'Gothorum gens perfida, sed pudica; 
Saxones crudelitate efferi sed castitate mirandi.' 
Woman in primitive Germany was bent to the 
earth beneath the weight of agricultural labour; 
but she became great in the dangers of war- 
the companion and partner of man — she shared 
his fate, and lightened his sorrows. 'Sic vi- 
vendum, sic pereundum,' says Tacitus. She 
withdrew not from the field of battle— she faced 
R 



194 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



its horrors — she turned not aside from its blood. 
She was the Goddess ofWar — the charming and 
terrible spirit which at once animated its spirit, 
and rewarded its dangers — which inspired the 
fury of the charge, and soothed the last moments 
of the dying warrior. She was to be seen on the 
field of blood, as Edith the swan-necked sought 
the body of Harold after the defeat of Hastings, 
or the young Englishwoman, who, to find her 
lost husband, turned over the dead on the field 
of Waterloo."— (Vol. I. pp. 150, 175.) 

" O si sic omnia !" The mind is rendered 
dizzy; it turns round as on the edge of a pre- 
cipice by the reflections arising out of this ani- 
mated picture. In truth may it be said, that 
these observations demolish at one blow the 
whole revolutionary theories of later times — 
they have turned the streams of French philo- 
sophy by their source. It was the cardinal 
point, the leading principle of the whole poli- 
tical speculation of the last half of the eight- 
eenth century, that institutions were every thing, 
character nothing; that man was moulded 
entirely by the government or religion to which 
he was subjected ; and that there was no essen- 
tial difference in the disposition of the different 
races which had overspread the earth. The 
first half of the nineteenth century was spent 
in the practical application of this principle. 
The French Jacobins conceived themselves 
adequate to forge constitutions for the whole 
world, and sent forth their armies of starving 
republicans to force them at the point of the 
bayonet on all mankind. Less vehement in 
their constitutional propagandism, the English 
have been more persevering, and incomparably 
more pernicious. Their example allured, as 
much as the horrors of the Revolution repelled, 
mankind. The ardent, the generous, the philan- 
thropic, everywhere sighed for the establish- 
ment of a government Avhich should give them 
at once the energy of the British character, the 
glories of the British empire. And what has 
been the result? — The desolation of Spain, the 
ruin of Portugal, the depopulation and blasting 
ef South America. Vain have been all at- 
tempts to transplant to nations of Celtic or 
Moorish descent, the institutions which grew 
and flourished among those of Anglo-Saxon 
blood. The ruin of the West India islands 
proves their inapplicability to those of negro 
extraction; — the everlasting distraction of Ire- 
land, to those of unmixed Celtic blood. A cen- 
tury of bloodshed, devastation, and wretched- 
ness will be spent ere mankind generally learn 
that there is an essential and indelible "distinc- 
tion between the character of the different races 
of men ; and, in Montesquieu's words, " that no 
nation ever attained to durable greatness but 
by institutions in harmony with its spirit." 

Nor is there any foundation for the common 
observation, that this presents a melancholy 
view of human affairs ; and that it is repugnant 
to our ideas of the beneficence of an overruling 
Providence to suppose that all nations are not 
adapted for the same elevating institutions. Are 
all nations blessed with the same climate, or 
soil, or productions? Will the vine and the 
olive flourish on every slope — the maize or the 
wheat on every plain? No. Every country 
has its own productions, riches, and advan- 



tages ; and the true wisdom of each is found 
to consist in cultivating the fruits, or develop- 
ing the riches, which Nature has bestowed. 
It is the same in the moral world. All nations 
were not framed in the same mould, because all 
were not destined for the same ends. To some 
was given, for the mysterious but beneficent 
designs of Providence, excellence in arms, and 
the ensanguined glory of ruthless conquest; to 
others supremacy in commerce, and the mis- 
sion of planting their colonies in distant lands ; 
to a few, excellence in literature and the arts, 
and the more durable dominion over the 
thoughts and minds of men. What sort of a 
world would it be if all nations were sanguinary 
and barbarous like the Tartars — or meek and 
patient like the Hindoos? If they all had the 
thirst for conquest of the Grand Army — or the 
rage for transplanting the institutions of the 
English? We boast, and in some respects 
with reason, of our greatness, our power, our 
civilization. Is there any man amongst us who 
would wish to see that civilization universal, 
with its accompaniments of nearly a seventh* 
of the whole population of the empire paupers ; 
— of Chartists, Socialists, Repealers, Anti-Corn- 
Law Leaguers, and landed selfishness ? 

As a specimen of Michelet's powers of de- 
scription, we extract his account of the battle 
of Azincour: — 

" The two armies presented a strange con- 
trast. On the side of the French were three 
enormous squadrons, three forests of lances, 
who formed in the narrow plain, and drew up as 
they successively emerged from the defiles in 
their rear. In front were the Constables, the 
Princes, the Dukes of Orleans, Bar and Alen- 
con, the Counts of Nevers, D'Eu, Richemont, 
and Vendome, amidst a crowd of barons, daz- 
zling in gold and steel, with their banners float- 
ing in the air, their horses covered with scales 
of armour. The French had archers also, but 
composed of the commons only; the haughty 
seigneurs would not give them a place in their 
proud array. Every place was fixed; no one 
would surrender his own ; the plebeians would 
have been a stain on that noble assembly 
They had cannons also, but made no use ol 
them : probably no one would surrender his 
place to them. 

" The English army was less brilliant in ap- 
pearance. The archers, 10,000 in number, had 
no armour, often no shoes ; they were rudely 
equipped with boiled skins, tied with osier 
wands, and strengthened by a bar of iron on 
their feet. Their hatchets and axes suspended 
from their girdles, gave them the appearance 
of carpenters. They all drew the bow with th6 
left arm — those of France with the right. Many 
of these sturdy workmen had stripped to the 
shirt, to be the more at ease; first, in drawing 
the bow, and at last in wielding the hatchet, 
when they issued from their hedge of stakes 
to hew away at those immovable masses of 
horses." 

"It is an extraordinary but well authenticated 
fact, that the French army was' so closely 
wedged together, and in great part so stuck in 



* Viz.— 1,446,000 in England and Wales; 76,000 in 
Scotland ; and 2,000,000 in Ireland. In all, 3,522,000, out 
of 27,000,000.— Census of 1841. 



MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS. 



195 



the mud, that they could neither charge nor re- 
treat; but just stood still to be cut to pieces. 
At the decisive moment, when the old Thomas 
of Erpingham arranged the English army, he 
threw his staff in the air, exclaiming, ' Now 
strike !' The shout of ten thousand voices was 
raised at once ; but to their great surprise, the 
French army stood still. Men and horses 
seemed alike enchained or dead in their ar- 
mour. In truth, these weighty war-horses, op- 
pressed with the load of their armour and 
riders, were unable to move. The French were 
thirty-two deep — the English only four.* That 
enormous depth rendered the great bulk of the 
French army wholly useless. The front ranks 
alone combated, and they were all killed. The 
remainder, unable either to advance or retreat, 
served only as a vast target to the unerring Eng- 
lish arrows, which never ceased to. rain down 
on the deep array. On the other hand, every 
Englishman wielded either his lance, his bow, 
or his hatchet, with effect. So thick was the 
storm of arrows which issued from the English 
stakes, that the French horsemen bent their 
heads to their saddle-bows, to avoid being 
pierced through their visors. Twelve hundred 
horse, impatient of the discharge, broke from 
the flanks, and charged. Hardly a tenth part 
reached the stakes, where they were pierced 
through, and soon fell beneath the English axes. 
Then those terrible archers issued from their 



palisade, and heAved to pieces the confused 
mass of wounded horses, dismounted men, and 
furious steeds, which, galled by the incessant 
discharge of arrows, was now turmoiling in the 
bloody mud in which the chivalry of France 
was engulfed."—(Vol. IV. pp. 307, 311.) 

We take leave of M. Michelet, at least for the 
present, as his work is only half finished, with 
admiration for his genius, respect for his eru- 
dition, and gratitude for the service he has ren- 
dered to history; but we cannot place him in 
the first rank of historians. He wants the art 
of massing objects and the spirit of general 
observation. His philosophy consists rather 
in drawing visions of the sequence of events, 
or speculations on an inevitable progress in 
human affairs, than an enlightened and manly 
recognition of a supreme superintendence. He 
unites two singularly opposite sets of princi- 
ples — a romantic admiration for the olden time, 
though with a full and just appreciation of its 
evils, with a devout belief in the advent of a 
perfect state of society, the true efflorescence of 
the nation, in the equality produced by the Re- 
volution. Yet is his work a great addition to 
European literature; and the writers of Eng- 
land would do well to look to their laurels, if 
they wish, against the able phalanx now arising 
on the other side of the Channel, to maintain 
the ancient place of their country in historic 
literature. 



MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS.t 



" I am surprised," said Condorcet to La- 
fayette, upon seeing him enter the room in the 
uniform of a private of the National Guards of 
Paris, of which he had so recently been the 
commander, — " I am surprised at seeing you, 
General, in that dress." — "Not at all," replied 
Lafayette, " / was tired of obeying, and wished to 
command, and therefore I laid down my general's 
commission, and took a musket on my shoul- 
der." — "Gnarus," says Tacitus, "beilis civili- 
bus, plus militibus quam ducibus licere." It 
is curious to observe how, in the most remote 
ages, popular license produces effects so pre- 
cisely similar. 

Of the numerous delusions which have over- 
spread the world in such profusion during the 
last nine months, there re none so extraordinary 
and so dangerous as the opinion incessantly 
inculcated by the revolutionary press, that the 
noblest virtue in regular soldiers is to prove 
themselves traitors to their oaths, and that a 
national guard is the only safe and constitutional 
force to whom arms can be intrusted. The 
troops of the line, whose revolt decided the 



♦ This formation was the same on both sides, when 
Napoleon's Imperial Guard attacked the British Guards 
at Waterloo. — See the indelible difference of race. 

■f Blackwood's Mapazine, April, 1831 : written nine 
mouths after the Revolution in Paris of 1830. It forms 
No. IV. on the French Revolution in that miscellany. 



three days in July in favour of the revolution- 
ary party, have been the subject of the most 
extravagant eulogium from the liberal press 
throughout Europe; and even in this country, 
the government journals have not hesitated to 
condemn, in no measured terms, the Royal 
Guard, merely because they adhered, amidst a 
nation's treason, to their honour and their 
oaths. 

Hitherto it has been held the first duty of 
soldiers to adhere with implicit devotion to 
that fidelity which is the foundation of military 
duties. Treason to his colours has been con- 
sidered as foul a blot on the soldier's scutcheon 
as cowardice in the field. Even in the most 
republican states, this principle of military 
subordination has been felt to be the vital 
principle of national strength. It was during 
the rigorous days of Roman discipline, that 
their legions conquered the world; and the 
decline of the empire began at the time that 
the Praetorian Guards veered with the mutable 
populace, and sold the empire for a gratuity to 
themselves. Albeit placed in power by the 
insurrection of the people, no men knew better 
than the French republican leaders that their 
salvation depended on crushing the military 
insubordination to which they had owed their 
elevation. When the Parisian levies began to 
evince a mutinous spirit in the camp at St. 



196 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Menehould, in Champagne, which they had 
imbibed during the license of the capital, Du- 
mourier drew them up in the centre of his in- 
trenchments, and showing them a powerful 
line of cavalry in front, with their sabres 
drawn, ready to charge, and a stern array of 
artillery and cannoneers in rear, with their 
matches in their hands, soon convinced the 
most licentious that the boasted independence 
of the soldier must yield to the dangers of 
actual warfare.* "The armed force," said 
Carnot, "is essentially obedient; it acts but 
should never deliberate," and in all his com- 
mands, that great man incessantly inculcated 
upon his soldiers the absolute necessity of im- 
plicit submission to the power which employed 
them.f When the recreant Constable de Bour- 
bon, at the head of a victorious squadron of 
Spanish cavalry, approached the spot where 
the rear-guard, under the Chevalier Bayard, 
was covering the retreat of the French army 
in the Valley of Aosta, he found him seated, 
mortally wounded, under a tree, with his eyes 
fixed on the cross which formed the hilt of his 
sword. Bourbon began to express pity for his 
fate. "Pity not me," said the high-minded 
Chevalier; "pity those who fight against their 
king, their country, and their oath." 

These generous feelings, common alike to 
republican antiquity and modern chivalry, 
have disappeared during the fumes of the 
French Revolution. The soldier who is now 
honoured, is not he who keeps, but he who 
violates his oath ; the rewards of valour shower- 
ed, not upon those who defend, but those who 
overturn the government; the incense of po- 
pular applause offered, not at the altar of 
fidelity, but at that of treason. Honours, re- 
wards, promotion, and adulation, have beeu 
lavished on the troops of the line, who over- 
threw the government of Charles X. in July 
last, while the Royal Guard, who adhered to 
the fortune of the falling monarch with ex- 
emplary fidelity, have been reduced to beg their 
bread from the bounty of strangers in a foreign 
land. A subscription has recently been opened 
in London for the most destitute of those de- 
fenders of royalty ; but the government jour- 
nals have stigmatized, as " highly dangerous," 
any indication of sympathy with their fidelity 
or their misfortunes. + 

If these ancient ideas of honour, however, 
are to be exploded, they have at least gone out 
of fashion in good company. The National 
Guard, who took up arms to overthrow the 
throne, have not been long in destroying the 
altar. During the revolt of February, 1831, 
the Cross, the emblem of salvation, was taken 
down from all the steeples in Paris by the 
citizen soldiers, and the image of our Saviour 
effaced, by their orders, from everv church 
within its bounds! The two principles stand 
and fall together. The Chevalier, without fear 
and without reproach, died in obedience to his 
oath, with his eyes fixed on the Cross; the 
National Guard lived in triumph, while their 
comrades bore down the venerated emblem 
from the towers of Notre Dame. 



* Mem. de Dumourier, iii. 172. 
t Carnot's Memoirs, 73. 



% Courier. 



" I can discover no other reason for the 
uniform progress of the republic," says Cicero, 
" but the constant sense of religion which has 
actuated its members. In numbers the Spa- 
niards excel us — in military ardour, the Gauls 
— in hardihood and obstinacy, the Germans ; 
but in veneration to the gods, and fidelity to 
their oaths, the Roman people exceed any 
nation that ever existed." We shall see 
whether the present times are destined to form 
an exception from these principles ; whether 
treason and infidelity are to rear the fabric in 
modern, which fidelity and religion construct- 
ed in ancient times. 

The extreme peril of such principles renders 
the inquiry interesting. — What have been the 
effects of military treachery in times past? 
Has it aided the cause of virtue, strengthened 
the principles of freedom, contributed to the 
prosperity of mankind 7 Or has it unhinged 
the fabric of society, blasted the cause of 
liberty, blighted the happiness of the people 1 

The first great instance of military treachery 
in recent times, occurred in the revolt of the 
French Guards, in June, 1789. That un- 
paralleled event immediately brought on the 
Revolution. The fatal example rapidly spread 
to the other troops brought up to overawe the 
capital, and the king, deprived of the support 
of his own troops, was soon compelled to sub- 
mit to the insurgents. It was these soldiers, 
not the mob of Paris, who stormed the Bastile ; 
all the efforts of the populace were unavailing 
till those regular troops occupied the adjoining 
houses, and supported tumultuary enthusiasm 
by military skill. 

Extravagant were the eulogiums, boundless 
the gratitude, great the rewards, which were 
showered down on the Gardes Fravcaiscs for 
this shameful act of treachery. Never were 
men the subjects of such extraordinary adu- 
lation. Wine and women, gambling and in- 
toxication, flattery and bribes, were furnished 
in abundance. And what was the conse- 
quence 1 The ancient honour of the Guards 
of France, of those guards who saved the 
Body Guards at Fontenoy, and inherited a line 
of centuries of splendour, perished without 
redemption on that fatal occasion. Tarnished 
in reputation, disunited in opinion, humbled in 
character, the regiment fell to pieces from a 
sense of its own shame; the early leader of 
the Revolution, its exploits never were heard 
of through all the career of glory which fol- 
lowed ; and the first act of revolt against their 
sovereign was the last act of their long and 
renowned existence. 

Nor were the consequences of this unexam- 
pled defection less dangerous to France than to 
the soldiers who were guilty of it. The insu- 
bordination, license, and extravagance of revolt 
were fatal to military discipline, and brought 
France to the brink of ruin. The disaffected 
soldiers, as has been observed in all ages, 
were intrepid only against their own sove- 
reign. When they were brought to meet the 
armies. of Prussia and Austria, they all took 
to flight; and on one occasion, by the admis- 
sion of Dumourier himself, ten thousand regu- 
lar soldiers fled from one thousand five hun- 
dred Prussian hussars. A little more energy 



MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS. 



197 



and ability in the allied commanders would 
have then destroyed the revolutionary govern- 
ment. 

Notwithstanding all the enthusiasm of the 
people, the weakness of insubordination con- 
tinued to paralyze all the efforts of the re- 
publican armies. France was again invaded, 
and brought to the brink of ruin in 1793, and 
the tide was then, for the first time, turned, 
when the iron rule of the mob began, and the 
terrific grasp of Carnot and Robespierre ex- 
tinguished all those principles of military 
license which had so much been the subject 
of eulogium at the commencement of the 
Revolution. 

Did this abandonment of military duty serve 
the cause of freedom, or increase the prosperi- 
ty of France 1 Did it establish liberty on a 
secure basis, or call down the blessings of 
posterity 1 It led immediately to all the an- 
guish and suffering of the Revolution — the 
murder of the king — the anarchy of the king- 
dom — the reign of terror — the despotism of 
Napoleon. They forgot their loyalty amidst 
the glitter of prostitution and the fumes of in- 
toxication ; their successors were brought back 
to it by the iron rule of the Committee of Pub- 
lic Safety : they revolted against the beneficent 
sway of a reforming monarch : they brought 
on their country a tyranny, which the pencil 
of Tacitus would hardly be able to portray. 

The revolt of the Spanish troops at the Isle 
of Leon, in 1819, was the next great example 
of military defection. What have been its 
consequences] Has Spain improved in free- 
dom — risen in character — augmented in wealth, 
since that glorious insurrection 1 It raised up, 
for a few years, the phantom of a constitu- 
tional throne, ephemeral as the dynasties of 
the east, pestilent as the breath of contagion. 
Spain was rapidly subjugated when it rested 
on such defenders — treason blasted their ef- 
forts, and the nation, which had gloriously re- 
sisted for six years the formidable legions of 
Napoleon, sunk under the first attack of an 
inexperienced army of invaders led by a Bour- 
bon prince. Since that time, to what a deplor- 
able condition has Spain been reduced! De- 
pressed by domestic tyranny, destitute of 
foreign influence — the ridicule and scorn of 
Europe — this once great power has almost 
been blotted from the book of nations. 

Portugal, Naples, and Piedmont, all had 
military revolutions about the same time. 
Have they improved the character, bettered 
the condition, extended the freedom, of these 
countries ? They have, on the contrary, esta- 
blished constitutions, the failure and absurdity 
of which have brought the cause of freedom 
itself into disrepute. The valiant revolters 
against the Neapolitan throne fled at the first 
sight of the Austrian battalions ; and the free 
institutions of Piedmont and Portugal, without 
foreign aggression, have all fallen from their 
own inherent weakness. All these premature 
attempts to introduce freedom by military re- 
volt, have failed ; and sterner despotism suc- 
ceeded, from the moral reaction consequent on 
their disappearance. 

Great part of the armies in South America 
revolted from the Spanish throne, and success 



has crowned their endeavours. What has 
been the consequence 1 Anarchy, confusion, 
and military confiscation — the rule of bayonets 
instead of that of mitres — suffering, dilapida- 
tion, and ruin, which have caused even the 
leaden yoke of the Castilian monarch to be 
regretted. 

At length the glorious days of July, 1830, 
arrived, and the declaration of the whole regu- 
lar troops of the line in Paris against the 
government, at once decided the contest in 
favour of the populace. Never was more ex- 
travagant praise bestowed on any body of men, 
than on the soldiers who had been guilty of 
this act of treason. It is worth while, there- 
fore, to examine what have been its effects, 
and whether the cause of freedom has really 
been benefitted in France by the aid of treach- 
ery. 

The French nation has got quit of the priest- 
ridden, imbecile race of monarchs ; men whose 
principles were arbitrary, habits indolent, in- 
tellects weak ; who possessed the inclination, 
but wanted the capacity to restrain the liberty 
of their people. 

They have terminated a pacific era, during 
which the country made unexampled progress 
in wealth, industry, and prosperity; during 
which many of the wounds of the Revolution 
were closed, and new channels of opulence 
opened; during which the principles of real 
freedom struck deeply their roots, and the in- 
dustrious habits were extensively spread, which 
can alone afford security for their continuance. 

They have begun, instead, the career of 
anarchy and popular tyranny. Industry has 
been paralyzed, credit suspended, prosperi- 
ty blighted. Commercial undertakings have 
ceased, distrust succeeded to confidence — de- 
spair to hope — the victims of the Revolution 
have disappeared, and the poor who gained it 
are destitute of bread. 

They have begun again the career of Re- 
publican ambition and foreign aggression ; 
they aim openly at revolutionizing other coun- 
tries, and they are unable to maintain the go- 
vernment they have established in their own. 
The Conscription is again rending asunder 
the affections of private life; the fountains of 
domestic happiness are closed; and war, with 
its excitements and its dangers, is again threat- 
ening to rouse the energies of its population. 
In the shock of contending factions, liberty is 
fast expiring. The imbecility of Polignac has 
been succeeded by the energy of Soult — the 
arbitrary principles of feeble priests is about 
to yield to the unbending despotism of ener- 
getic republicans. 

By the confession of the journals who sup- 
port the Revolution, its advantages are all to 
conic; bitter and unpalatable have been its 
fruits to this hour. The three per cents, have 
fallen from 80 to 50 ; twelve thousand work- 
men, without bread, in Paris alone, are main- 
tained on the public works ; great part of the 
banks and mercantile houses are bankrupt; 
Lafitte himself is barely solvent; the opulent 
classes are rapidly leaving the capital ; no one 
expends his fortune ; universal distrust and 
apprehension have dried up the sources of 
industry. 

B 2 



193 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



The government, blown about with every 
wind of doctrine, is wholly unable to prevent 
the downward progress of the Revolution. 
As usual in public convulsions, the audacious, 
the reckless, the desperate, are pressing for- 
ward to the front ranks, and the moderate 
and rational sinking into obscurity. The 
Doctrinaires were subverted by the tumults in 
October; their successors by the crisis in De- 
cember; the last ministers, by the explosion 
in February. Without authority, power, or 
influence, the throne is rapidly falling into 
contempt; the private virtues and firm cha- 
racter of the king, are alone adequate to stem 
the swelling Hood of democracy. 

Impelled by revolutionary ambition into 
foreign war, the government of France, whe- 
ther republican or monarchical, must inevita- 
bly become despotic. If the allies succeed, 
the Bourbons will be restored at the point of 
the bayonet. If the republicans are victo- 
rious, military despotism will speedily be esta- 
blished. The victorious legions will not sur- 
render the authority they have won. A second 
successful commander will, under the name 
of Consul, Dictator, or Emperor, re-establish the 
empire of the sword. After drenching Europe 
with blood, democratic ambition will in the end 
find itself mastered by the power it has pro- 
duced ; victorious or vanquished, it will prove 
fatal to its parent freedom. 

Such have been the fruits of military treach- 
ery in France. 

Does Belgium afford a more flattering pros- 
pect to the advocates of military defection ! 
Has treason, pestilential and blasting else- 
where, there brought forth the sweet and lasting 
fruits of peace, tranquillity, and industry? Is 
the independence of Flanders as secure, its 
commerce as flourishing, its people as con- 
tented, its agriculture as prosperous, its poor as 
well fed, as under the hateful reign of the 
Orange dynasty 1 By the admission of the ad- 
vocates of revolution, according to the state- 
ment of M. Potter himself, they have gained 
only anarchy and wretchedness, "discord with- 
in, contempt without — the intrigues of kings — 
the divisions of faction — the apathy of despair." 

Effects so uniform, consequences so unva- 
rying, must spring from some common cause. 
Victorious or vanquished, military treachery 
has proved fatal to every state where it has pre- 
vailed : it has everywhere blighted industry, 
shaken credit, destroyed freedom. Liberty has 
never suffered so much as from the rude and 
sacrilegious hands of such defenders. 

" It must constantly be understood, and it is 
not sufficiently recollected," said Guizot in the 
Chamber of Deputies on the 3d of February, 
1831, " that freedom is never in such danger as 
after a successful revolution. Habits cannot 
be conceived so much at variance with the pro- 
tection of the people as the excitation, ambi- 
tion, and misrule, which arise from their first 
triumph." These were the words of the repub- 
lican minister established in office by the revolt 
in July ; aflcr he had been driven from the helm 
by the increasing vigour of the democratic fac- 
tion to which he owed his elevation. 

If the matter be considered coolly, it must at 
once appear that freedom never can be purchased 



by the revolt of soldiers ; and that the military 
treachery which is so much the object of eulo- 
gium, is more dangerous to the liberty which 
has excited it, than to any other human interest. 

Freedom consists in the coercion of each 
class by the jealousies and exertions of the 
others. The crown is watched by the people, 
the aristocracy by the crown, the populace by 
the aristocracy. It is the jealousy and efforts 
of these different interests to keep each other 
within due bounds, which form the balance of 
power indispensable to civil liberty. Without 
such an equilibrium, one or other of the con- 
stituent bodies must be crushed, and the ascen- 
dency of the other rendered subversive of gene- 
ral freedom. 

But when an established government is over- 
turned by a revolt of its own soldiers, the event 
occurs which is of all others the most fatal to 
public liberty, viz., the destruction of subsisting 
power by an armed and limited class in the 
state. The bayonet becomes thenceforward 
the irresistible argument of the dominant body, 
and liberty, exterminated by its own defenders, 
sinks in the struggle which was created in her 
name. 

It is quite in vain to expect that men of reck- 
less and licentious habits, like the majority of 
soldiers in every country, will quietly resign 
the supreme authority after having won it at 
the peril of their lives. Individuals sometimes 
may make such a sacrifice — large bodies never 
have, and never will. The Praetorian Guards 
of Rome, and the Janizaries of Constantinople, 
have often revolted against the reigning power, 
and bestowed the throne on their own favourite ; 
but it has never been found that general free- 
dom was improved by the result, or that indi- 
viduals were better defended against oppres- 
sion after it than before. 

Freedom cannot be established in a day by 
the successful issue of a single revolt. — Its 
growth is as slow as that of industry in the in- 
dividual : its preservation dependent on the es- 
tablishment of regular habits, and the main- 
tenance of a courageous spirit in the people. 
Nothing can be so destructive to these habits 
as a successful revolt of the soldiery. The 
ambition which it awakens, the sudden eleva- 
tion which it confers, the power which it lodges 
in armed and inexperienced hands, are, of all 
things, the most fatal to the sober, patient and 
unobtrusive habits, which are the parent of 
real freedom. The industry, frugality, and mo- 
deration of pacific life, appear intolerable to 
men who are dazzled by the glittering prospect 
of revolutionary triumph. 

A successful insurrection in the army lodges 
supreme authority at once in an armed force. 
No power capable of counteracting it remains. 
The majesty of the throne, the sense of duty, 
the sanctity of an oath, the awe of the legis- 
lature, have all been set at naught. The ener- 
gy of the citizens has never been developed, 
because the revolt of the soldiers terminated 
the contest before their support was required. 
The struggle has depended entirely between 
the throne and the army; the interest of the 
state can never be promoted by the victory of 
either of these contending parties. 

This is the circumstance which must always 



MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS. 



199 



render treason in the army destructive to last- 
ing freedom. It terminates the struggle at once, 
before any impulse has been communicated to 
the unarmed citizens, or they have acquired the 
vigour and military prowess which is alone ca- 
pable of controlling them. The people merely 
change masters ; instead of the king and his 
ministers, they get the general and his officers. 
The rule of the sovereign is looked back to 
with bitter regret, when men have tasted of the 
severity of military license, and experienced 
the rigour of military execution. Whereas, 
during the vicissitudes of a civil war, the ener- 
gy of all classes is brought into action, and the 
chance of obtaining ultimate freedom improved 
by the very difficulty with which it has been 
won. The British constitution, the gradual re- 
sult of repeated contests between the crown 
and the people, has subsisted unimpaired for 
centuries — the French, effected at once by the 
treachery of the army, has been as short-lived 
as the popularity of its authors. There is no 
royal road to freedom any more than to geo- 
metry; it is by patient exertion and progressive 
additions to their influence, that freedom is ac- 
quired by nations not less than eminence by 
individuals. 

What then, it may be asked, are soldiers to 
do when a sovereign like Charles X. promul- 
gates ordinances subversive of public freedom ? 
Are they to make themselves the willing instru- 
ment in enslaving their fellow citizens 1 We 
answer, Certainly; if they have any regard for 
the ultimate maintenance of their liberty. If 
illegal measures have been adopted, let them 
be repealed by the civil authorities or by the 
efforts of the people; but never let the soldiers 
take the initiative in attempting their over- 
throw. The interests of liberty require this as 
indispensably as those of order. Nothing short 
of an unanimous declaration of the national 
will by the higher classes, should lead to a de- 
fection from loyalty on the part of its sworn 
defenders. 

In former times, no doubt, many examples 
have occurred of the incipient efforts of free- 
dom being entirely extinguished by military 
execution; but no such catastrophe need be 
apprehended in countries where the press is 
established; the republicans themselves have 
everywhere proclaimed this truth. The opi- 
nions and interests of the many must prevail 
where their voice is heard. The only thing to 
be feared for them is from their own passions. 
The only danger to liberty in such circum- 
stances is from its own defenders ; the violence 
to be apprehended is not that of the throne, 
but of the populace. 

No stronger proof of this can be imagined 
than has been furnished by the recent revolu- 
tion in France and Belgium. The revolt of the 
soldier at once established the rule of the mob 
in these countries, and put an end, for a lons^ 
time at least, to every hope of freedom. What 
security is there afforded for property, life, or 
character] Confessedly none; everything is 
determined by the bayonet of the National 
Guard and army; neither the throne nor the 
people can withstand them. Freedom was as 
little confirmed by their revolt, as at Constan- 
tinople by an insurrection of the Janizaries. 



liiberty in France was endangered for the mo- 
ment by the ordinances of the Bourbons: it 
has been destroyed by the insurrection planned 
to overthrow them. Freedom, supported as it 
then was, by an energetic and democratic press, 
and a republican population, ran no risk of per- 
manent injury from the intrigues of the court. 
A priest-ridden monarch, guided by imbecile 
ministers, could never have subjugated an 
ardent, high-spirited, aad democratic people. 

But the danger is very different from the en- 
ergy of the republicans, and the ambition of the 
soldiers. Marshal Soult and his bayonets are 
not so easily dealt with as Prince Polignac 
and his Jesuits. The feeble monarchy of 
Louis XVI. was overturned with ease ; the 
terrible Committee of Public Safety, the des- 
potic Directory, the energetic sway of Napo- 
leon, ruled the Revolution, and crushed free- 
dom, even in its wildest fits. Three days' 
insurrection destroyed the feeble government 
of Charles. A revolt ten times more formi- 
dable was crushed with ease by the military 
power of the Convention. 

Had the soldiers not revolted in July, what 
would have been the consequence 1 The in- 
surrection in Paris, crushed by a garrison of 
twelve thousand men, would have speedily 
sunk. A new Chamber, convoked on the 
basis of the royal ordinance, would have 
thrown the ministers into a minority in the 
Chamber of Deputies, and by them the obnox- 
ious measure would have been repealed. If 
there is any truth in the growing influence of 
public opinion, so uniformly maintained by 
liberal writers, this must have been the result. 
No representatives chosen by any electors in 
France, could have withstood the odium which 
supporting the measures of the court would 
have produced. Thus liberty would have been 
secured without exciting the tempest which 
threatens its own overthrow. Public credit, 
private confidence, general prosperity, would 
have been maintained ; the peace of the world 
preserved ; the habits conducive to a state of 
national freedom engendered. 

What have been the consequences of the 
boasted treachery of the troops of the line in 
July 7 The excitation of revolutionary hopes ; 
the rousing of democratic ambition ; a ferment 
in society; the abandonment of useful indus- 
try ; the government of the mob ; the arming 
of France. ; the suspension of pacific enterprise. 
A general war must in the end ensue from its 
effects. Europe will be drenched with blood, 
and whatever be the result, it will be equally 
fatal to the cause of freedom. If the aristo- 
cracy prevail, it will be the government of the 
sword ; if the. populace, of the guillotine. 

A civil war in France would have been far 
more serviceable to the cause of real liberty 
than the sudden destruction of the government 
by the revolt of the army. In many periods 
of history, freedom has emerged from the col- 
lision of different classes in society, in none 
from military insubordination. 

If Charles I. had possessed a regular army, 
and it had betrayed its trust on the first break- 
ing out of the great Rebellion, would the result 
have been as favourable to the cause of liberty, 
as the long contest which ensued 7 Nothing 



200 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



can be clearer than that it would not. No 
greater consequences would have followed 
such a revolt, than any of the insurrections of 
the barons against the princes of York and 
Lancaster. A revolution so easily achieved, 
would as easily have been abandoned: liberty 
would never have been gained, because the 
trials had not been endured by which it is to 
be won. The only security for its continu- 
ance is to be found in the energy and courage 
of the citizens : it is not by witnessing the de- 
struction of government by a mutinous soldiery 
that these habits are to be acquired. 

Soldiers, therefore, who adhere to their ho- 
nour and their oaths, are in reality the best 
friends of the cause of freedom. They pre- 
vent the struggle for its maintenance from 
being converted into amortal combat, in which 
the victory of either party must prove fatal to 
the very object for which they are contending. 
They prevent the love of independence from 
being transformed into the spirit of insubordi- 
nation, and the efforts of freedom blasted by 
the violence of popular, or the irresistible 
weight of military ambition. They turn the 
spirit of liberty into a pacific channel; and 
averting it from that direction where it falls 
under the rule of violence, retain it in that 
where wisdom and foresight duly regulate its 
movements. 

The institution of a National Guard, of which 
so much is now said, is not less the subject 
of delusion, than the boasted treachery of regu- 
lar soldiers. 

Citizen soldiers are most valuable additions 
to the force of a regular army, and when actu- 
ated by a common and patriotic feeling, they are 
capable of rendering most effective service to 
the stau . The landwehr of Prussia, and the vo- 
lunteers of Russia, sufficiently demonstrated that 
truth during the campaigns of 1812 and 1813. 
They are a valuable force also for preserv- 
ing domestic tranquillity up to a certain point, 
when little real peril is to be encountered, and 
a display of moral opinion is of more weight 
than the exertion of military prowess. But 
they are a force that cannot be relied on dur- 
ing the shades of opinion which take place 
in a revolution, and still less in the perilous 
strife which follows the actual collision of one 
class of the state with another. This has been 
completely demonstrated during both theFrench 
Revolutions. 

The National Guard of Paris was first em- 
bodied on the 20th July, 1789, a week after the 
capture of the Bastile. During the first fer- 
vour of the revolutionary ardour, and before 
the strife of faction had brought the opposite 
parties into actual contest, they frequently ren- 
dered effective service to the cause of order. 
On more than one occasion, headed bv Lafa- 
yette, they dispersed seditious assemblages, 
and once, in June, 1792, were brought to fire 
upon the Jacobins in the Champ de Mars. But 
whenever matters approached a crisis, when 
the want and suffering consequent on a revo- 
lution had brought forward angry bodies of 
workmen from the Fauxbourg; when the 
question was not one of turning out to parade, 
but of fighting an exasperated multitude, they 
uniformly failed. 



The citizen soldiers, headed by Lafayette, 
were under arms in great force on the 5th Oc- 
tober, 1789, when a furious rabble marched 
to Versailles, broke into and plundered the 
palace, attempted to murder the queen, and 
brought the Royal Family in captivity to Paris, 
preceded by the heads of their faithful Body 
Guards. They refused for five hours to listen 
to the entreaties of their commander to march 
to protect the palace of the king against that 
atrocious insult ; and when they did go, were 
too irresolute to prevent the violence which 
followed. 

They stood by on 20th June, 1792, when a 
vociferous rabble broke into the hall of the 
Assembly, threatening the obnoxious deputies 
with instant death; when they rushed into the 
Palace of the Tuileries, pushed their pikes at 
the breast of Louis, placed the Cap of Liberty 
on his head, and brought the Royal Family and 
the monarchy into imminent danger. 

They assembled at the sound of the qene'rale, 
when the Fauxbourgs rose in revolt on the 
10th August, and their dense battalions, plen- 
tifully supported by cavalry and artillery, ac- 
cumulated in great force round the Tuileries. 
But division, irresolution, and timidity, para- 
lyzed their ranks. First the Gendarmerie de- 
serted to the assailants; then the cannoneers 
unloaded their guns; several battalions next 
joined the insurgents, and the [ew that re- 
mained faithful were so completely paralyzed 
by the general defection of their comrades, 
that they were unable to render any effective 
support to the Swiss Guard. From amidst a 
forest of citizen bayonets, the monarch was 
dragged a captive to the Temple, and the go- 
vernment of France yielded up to a sanguinary 
rabble. Seven thousand National Guards, on 
that day, yielded up their sovereign to a despi- 
cable rabble ; as many hundred faithful regular 
soldiers in addition to the heroic Swiss Guard 
would have established his throne and pre- 
vented the Reign of Terror. 

When Lafayette, indignant at the atrocities 
of the Jacobins, repaired to Paris from the 
army,and assigned a rendezvous at his house, 
in the evening of June 27, 1792, to the Na- 
tional Guard, of which he had so lately been 
the popular commander, in order to march 
against the Jacobin club, only thirty men 
obeyed the summons. The immense majority 
evinced a fatal apathy, and surrendered up 
their country, without a struggle, to the empire 
of the Jacobins. 

When Louis, Marie Antoinette, and the 
Princess Elisabeth, were successively led out 
to the scaffold ; when the brave and virtuous 
Madame Roland became the victim of the free- 
dom she had worshipped; when Vergniaud 
and the illustrious leaders of the Gironde 
were brought to the block ; when Danton and 
Camille Desmoulins were destroyed by the 
mob whom they excited, the National Guard 
lined the streets and attended the cars to the 
guillotine. 

When the executions rose to a hundred 
daily; when the shopkeepers closed their win- 
dows, to avoid witnessing the dismal spectacles 
of the long procession which was approaching 
the scaffold ; when a ditch was dug to convey the 



MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS. 



201 



blood of the victims to the Seine ; when France 
groaned under tyranny, unequalled since the 
beginning of the world, forty thousand National 
Guards, with arms in their hands, looked on in 
silent observation of the mournful spectacle. 

When indignant nature revolted at the cruelty; 
when, by a generous union, the members of all 
sides of the Assembly united, the power of the 
tyrants was shaken ; when Robespierre was de- 
clared hors la lot, and the gC7ieralc was beat to 
summon the citizen soldiers to make a last 
effort in behalf, not only of their country, but of 
their own existence, only three thousand obeyed 
the summons ! Thirty-seven thousand declined 
to come forward in the contest for their lives, 
their families, and every thing that was dear to 
them. With this contemptible force was Robes- 
pierre besieged in the Hotel de Ville ; and but 
for the fortunate and unforeseen defection of 
the cannoneers of theFauxbourgs in the Place 
de Greve, the tyrants would have been success- 
ful, the Assembly destroyed, and the reign of 
the guillotine perpetuated on the earth. 

When the reaction in favour of the victors, 
on the 9th Thermidor, had roused the Parisian 
population against the sanguinary rule of the 
Convention; when, encouraged by the contempt- 
ible force at the disposal of government, forty 
thousand of the National Guard assaulted five 
thousand regular soldiers, in position at the 
Tuileries, on Oct. 31, 1795, Napoleon showed 
what reliance could be placed on the citizen 
soldiers. With a few discharges of artillery he 
checked the advance of the leading battalions, 
spread terror through their dense columns, 
and a revolt, which was expected to overthrow 
the tyranny of the delegates of the people, ter- 
minated by the establishment of military des- 
potism. 

When Augereau, on 4th Sept., 1797, at the 
command of the Directory, seized sixty of the 
popular leaders of the legislature; when the 
law of the sword began, and all the liberties of 
the Revolution were about to be sacrificed at 
the altar of military violence, the National 
Guard declined to move, and saw their fellow- 
citizens, the warmest supporters of their liber- 
ties, carried into captivity and exile, without 
attempting a movement in their behalf. 

When Napoleon overthrew the government 
in 1800 ; when, like another Cromwell, he 
seized the fruits of another Revolution ; when 
he marched his grenadiers into the council of 
Five Hundred, and made the stern rule of the 
sword succeed to the visions of enthusiastic 
freedom, the National Guard remained quiet 
spectators of the destruction of their country's 
liberties, and testified the same submission to 
the reign of military, which they had done to 
that of democratic violence. 

The National Guard was re-organized in 
August, 1830, and their conduct since that time 
has been the subject of unmeasured eulogium 
from all the liberal journals of Europe. The 
throne was established by their bayonets; the 
Citizen King has thrown himself upon their 
support; they were established in great force 
in every quarter of Paris, and the public tran- 
quillity intrusted to their hands. History has 
a right to inquire what they have done to justify 
the high praises of their supporters, and how 
26 



far the cause of order and rational liberty has 
gained by their exertions. 

They had the history of the former Revolu- 
tion clearly before their eyes ; they knew well, 
by dear-bought experience, that when popular 
violence is once loused, it overthrows all the 
bulwarks both of order and freedom ; they 
were supported by all the weight of govern- 
ment: they had every thing at stake, in keep- 
ing down the ferment of the people. With so 
many motives to vigorous action, what have 
they done 7 

They permitted an unruly mob of thirty 
thousand persons to assemble round the Palace 
of Louis Philippe, on October 25, 1830, and so 
completely shatter his infant authority, that he 
was obliged to dismiss the able and philosophic 
Guizot, the greatest historian of France, and 
the whole cabinet of the Doctrinaires, from his 
councils, to make way for republican leaders 
of sterner mould, and better adapted to the in- 
creasing violence of the popular mind. 

At the trial of Polignac, the whole National 
Guard of Paris and the departments in the 
neighbourhood, seventy thousand strong, was 
assembled in the capital ; and what was the 
proof which the government gave of confidence 
in their loyalty and efficiency in the cause of 
order 1 Albeit encamped, as Lafayette said, at 
the Luxembourg, amidst twenty thousand Na- 
tional Guards, four thousand troops of the line, 
three thousand cavalry, and forty pieces of ar- 
tillery, the government did not venture to with- 
draw the state prisoners to Vincennes in day- 
light ; and, but for the stratagem of Montalivet, 
in getting them secretly conveyed away in the 
middle of the night, in his own caleche, from 
the midst of that vast encampment of citizen 
soldiers, they would have been murdered in 
the street, within sight of that very supreme 
tribunal which had pronounced that sentence, 
and saved their lives. 

At that critical moment, the cannoneers of 
the National Guard, placed with their pieces at 
the Louvre, declared, that, if matters came to 
extremities, they would have turned their can- 
non against the government. Great part of 
the infantr} r , it was found, could not be relied 
on. The agitation occasioned by these events 
produced another change in the ministry, but 
no additional security to the throne. 

In February last, the National Guard joined 
the populace in pillaging the palace of the 
Archbishop of Paris; and joining in lhe in- 
fernal cry against every species of religion, 
scaled every steeple in Paris, with sacrilegious 
hands tore down the cross from their summits, 
and disgraced their uniforms by effacing the 
image of our Saviour in all the churches in 
the metropolis. The apathy and irresolution 
of the National Guard in repressing the disor- 
der of the populace on this occasion, was such 
as to call for a reproof even from the most ar- 
dent supporters of republican institutions. The 
consequence has been a third change of minis- 
ters in little more than six months. 

The Paris journals are daily full of the dis- 
tress of the labouring classes, the stagnation 
of commercial enterprise, the want of confi- 
dence, and the disgraceful tumults which in- 
cessantly agitate the public mind, and have 



202 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



prevented the resumption of any industrial 
occupation. All this takes place in the midst, 
and under the eye of fifty thousand National 
Guards, in the city alone. 

History will record that the National Guard 
of France was instituted in 1789, for the con- 
solidation of free institutions, and the preserva- 
tion of public tranquillity. 

That since its establishment, the government 
and prevailing institutions have been the sub- 
ject of incessant change; that they have had 
in turn a constitutional monarchy, a fierce de- 
mocracy, a sceptre of blood, a military consti- 
tution, a despotic consulate, an imperial throne, 
a regulated monarchy, and a citizen king. 

That during their guardianship, a greater 
number of lives have perished in civil war — 
a greater number of murders taken place on 
the scaffold — a greater extent of confiscation 
of fortune been inflicted — a greater quantity 
of wealth destroyed — a greater degree of vio- 
lence exerted by the people — a greater sum of 
anguish endured — than in an equal extent of 
time and population, in any age or country, 
since the beginning of the world! 

That it has almost invariably failed at the de- 
cisive mement; that, instituted for the defence 
of property, it has connived at unheard-of spo- 
liation ; appointed for the preservation of order, 
its existence has been chiefly signalized by 
misrule; charged with the defence of life, it 
has permitted blood to flow in ceaseless tor- 
rents. 

Nothing therefore can be more unfounded 
in fact, than the applause so generally bestowed 
on this popular institution, considered as the 
sole or principal support of government. — It 
has been of value only as an auxiliary to the 
regular force ; it is utterly unserviceable in 
the crisis of civil warfare ; and is then only 
of real utility when some common patriotic 
feeling has sunk all minor shades of opinion 
in one general emotion. 

It is impossible it ever should be otherwise 
— citizen soldiers are extremely serviceable 
when they are subjected to the bonds of dis- 
cipline, and obedient to the orders of the 
supreme power. But when they take upon 
themselves to discuss the measures or form 
of government, and instead of obeying orders 
to canvass principles, there is an end not only 
of all efficiency in their force, but of all utility 
in their institution. Fifty thousand legislators, 
with bayonets in their hands, form a hopeless 
National Assembly. 

This is the circumstance which, in every 
decisive crisis between the opposing parties, 
paralyzed the National Guard of Paris, and to 
the end of time will paralyze all volunteer 
troops in similar extremities: They shared in 
the opinions of their fellow-citizens ; they were 
members of clubs, as well as the unarmed 
multitude; they were as ready to fight with 
each other, as with the supporters of anarchy. 
The battalions drawn from the Fauxbourg St. 
Germains or the quarters of the Palais Royal, 
and the Chaussee d'Antin, were disposed to 
support the monarchy ; but those from the 
Fauxbourg St. Antoine and St. Marceau, were 
as determined to aid the cause of democracy; 
and in this divided state, the battalions of a 



democratic cast, from their superior numbers, 
acquired a fatal ascendency. 

The case would be the same in London if a 
similar crisis should arrive. The battalions 
from the Regent Park, Regent Street, Picca- 
dilly, the West End, and all the opulent 
quarters, might be relied on to support the 
cause of order; but what could be expected 
from those raised in Wapping, Deptford, St. 
Giles, Spitalfields, or all the innumerable lanes 
and alleys of the city, and its eastern suburbs '? 
If the National Guard of London were an 
hundred thousand strong, at least twenty thou- 
sand of them would, from their habits, incli- 
nations, and connections, side, on the first real 
crisis, with the democratic party. 

It is a fatal delusion to suppose that at all 
events, and in all circumstances, the National 
Guard would be inclined to support the cause 
of order, and prevent the depredation from 
which they would be first to suffer : — They un- 
questionably would be inclined to do so up to 
a certain point of danger, and as long as they 
believed that the ruling power in the state was 
likely to prove victorious. But no sooner does 
the danger become more urgent, no sooner 
does the government run the risk of defeat, 
than the National Guard is paralyzed, from the 
very circumstance of its being in great part 
composed of men of property. The great ca- 
pitalist is the most timid animal in existence; 
next comes the great shopkeeper, lastly the 
little tradesman. Their resolution is inversely 
as their wealth. In all ages, desperate daring 
valour has been found in the greatest degree 
amongst the lowest class of society. The 
multiplied enjoyments of life render men un- 
willing to incur the risk of losing them. 

No sooner, therefore, does the democratic 
party appear likely to become victorious, than 
the shopkeepers of the National Guard begin 
to think only of extricating their private affairs 
from the general ruin. Sauve qui pent is then, 
if not the general cry, at least the general feel- 
ins:. The merchant sees before him a dismal 
vista of sacked warehouses and burnt stores; 
the manufacturer, of insurgent workmen and 
suspended orders ; the tradesman, of pillaged 
shops and ruined custom. Despairing of the 
commonwealth, they recur, as all men do in 
evident peril, to the unerring instinct of self- 
preservation ; and from the magnitude of their 
stake, fall under the influence of this appre- 
hension long before it has reached the lower 
and more reckless classes of society. 

Admirable, therefore, as an auxiliary to the 
regular force in case of peril from foreign in- 
vasion, a National Guard is not to be relied on 
during the perils and divisions of civil con- 
flict. It always has, and always will fail in 
extremity, when a war of opinion agitates the 
state. 

The only sure support of order in such 
unhappy circumstances is to be found in a 
numerous and honourable body of regular sol- 
diers. Let not the sworn defender of order be 
tainted by the revolutionary maxim, that the 
duties of the citizen are superior to those of 
the soldier, and that nature formed them as 
men, before society made them warriors. The 
first duty of a soldier, the first principle of 



ARNOLD'S ROME. 



203 



military honour, is fidelity to the executive 
power. In crushing an insurrection of the 
populace in a mixed government, he is not 
enslaving his fellow-citizens; he is only turn- 
ing the efforts of freedom into their proper 
channel, and preventing the contest of opinion 
from degenerating into that of force. Liberty 
has as much to hope from his success as tran- 



quillity : nothing is so fatal to its establishment 
as the violence exerted for its extension. In, 
this as in other instances, it is not lawful to 
do evil that good may come of it; and phi- 
losophy will at length discover, what reason 
and religion have long ago taught, that the 
only secure foundation for ultimate expedi- 
ence, is the present discharge of duty. 



ARNOLD'S ROME. 



The history of Rome will remain, to the lat- 
est age of the world, the most attractive, the 
most useful, and the most elevating subject of 
human contemplation. It must ever form the 
basis of a liberal and enlightened education ; 
it must ever present the most important object 
to the contemplation of the statesman ; it must 
ever exhibit the most heart-stirring record to 
the heart of the soldier. Modern civilization, 
the arts, and the arms, the freedom and the in- 
stitutions of Europe around us, are the bequest 
of the Roman legions. The roads which we 
travel are, in many places, those which these 
indomitable pioneers of civilization first cleared 
through the wilderness of nature ; the language 
which we speak is more than half derived from 
Roman words ; the laws by which we are pro- 
tected have found their purest fountains in the 
treasures of Roman jurisprudence; the ideas 
in which we glory are to be found traced out 
in the fire of young conception in the Roman 
writers. In vain does the superficial acquire- 
ment, or shallow variety, of modern liberalism 
seek to throw off the weight of obligation to the 
grandeur or virtue of antiquity; in vain are 
we told that useful knowledge is alone worthy 
of Cultivation, that ancient fables have gone 
past, and that the study of physical science 
should supersede that of the ancient authors. 
Experience, the great detector of error, is per- 
petually recalling to our minds the inestimable 
importance of Roman history. The more that 
our institutions become liberalized, the more 
rapid the strides which popular ideas make 
amongst us, the more closely do we cling to the 
annals of a state which underwent exactly the 
same changes, and suffered the consequences of 
the same convulsions ; and the more that we ex- 
perience the insecurity, the selfishness, and the 
rapacity of democratic ambition, the more high- 
ly do we come to appreciate the condensed wis- 
dom with which the great historians of anti- 
quity, by a word or an epithet, stamped its 
character, or revealed its tendency. 

There is something solemn, and evidently 
providential, in the unbroken advance and ul- 
timate boundless dominion of Rome. The his- 
tory of other nations corresponds nearly to the 
vicissitudes of prosperity and disaster, of good 



* History of Rome. By Thomas Arnold, D. I>., Head 
Master of Rugby School ; late Fellow of Oriel College, 
Oxford ; and member of ihe Archieolneic.il Society of 
Rome. London : B. Fellowes. 1838. Blackwood's Ma- 
gazine, August, 1838 



and evil fortune, which we observe in the na- 
tions of the world at this time. The brilliant 
meteor of Athenian greatness disappeared from 
the world almost as soon as the bloody phantas- 
magoria of the French Revolution. In half-a- 
century after they arose, naught remained of 
either but the works of genius they had pro- 
duced, and the deeds of glory they had done. 
The wonders of Napoleon's reign faded as ra- 
pidly as the triumphs of the Macedonian con- 
queror; and the distant lustre of Babylon and 
Nineveh is faintly recalled by the ephemeral 
dynasties which have arisen, under the pres- 
sure of Arabian or Mogul conquest, in the re- 
gions of the east in modern times. But, in the 
Roman annals, a different and mightier system 
developes itself. From the infancy of the re- 
public, from the days even of the kings, and the 
fabulous reigns of Romulus and Numa, an un- 
broken progress is exhibited which never ex- 
perienced a permanent reverse till the eagles 
of the republic had crossed the Euphrates, and 
all the civilized world, from the wall of Anto- 
nius to the foot of Mount Atlas, was subjected 
to their arms. Their reverses, equally with 
their triumphs — their defeats, alike with their 
victories — their infant struggles with the cities 
of Latium, not less than their later contests 
with Carthage and Mithridates — contributed to 
develope their strength, and may be regarded 
as the direct causes of their dominion. It was 
in the long wars with the Etruscan and Sam- 
nite communities that the discipline and tactics 
were slowly and painfully acquired, which en- 
abled them to face the banded strength of the 
Carthagenian confederacy, — and in the des- 
perate struggle with Hannibal, that the resolu- 
tion and skill were drawn forth which so soon, 
on its termination, gave them the empire of the 
world. The durability of the fabric was in 
proportion to the tardiness of its growth, and 
the solidity of its materials. The twelve vul 
tures which Romulus beheld on the Palatine 
Hill were emblematic of the twelve centuries 
which beheld the existence of the empire of the 
west; and it required a thousand years more 
of corruption and decline to extinguish in the 
east this brilliant empire, which, regenerated 
by the genius of Constantine, found, in the 
riches and matchless situation of Byzantium, 
a counterpoise to all the effeminacy of oriental 
manners, and all the ferocity of the Scythian 
tribes. 

It is remarkable that time has not yet pro- 



204 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



duced a history of this wonderful people com- 
mensurate either to their dignity, their import- 
ance, or their intimate connection with modern 
institutions. The pictured pages and matchless 
descriptions of Livy, indeed, will, to the end 
of the world, fascinate the imagination and 
subdue the hearts of men ; but it is a fragment 
only of his great work which has descended to 
our times ; and even when complete, it came 
down only to the time of Augustus, and broke 
off exactly at the period when nations, arrived 
at the stage of existence to which we have 
grown, are most interested in its continuance. 
The condensed wisdom, energetic expressions, 
and practical experience of Sallust and Taci- 
tus, apply only to detached periods of the later 
annals; and, though not a page of their im- 
mortal works can be read without suggesting 
reflections on the extraordinary political saga- 
city which they had acquired from experience, 
or received from nature, yet we shall look in 
vain, in the fragments of this work which have 
survived the wreck of time, for a connected 
detail even of the later periods of Roman story. 
The moderns appear to have been deterred, by 
the exquisite beauty of these fragments of an- 
cient history, from adventuring at all on the 
same field. Ferguson's is considered by the 
English, and admitted by the Germans, to be 
the best connected history of the Republic 
which exists ; but not only does it embrace 
merely, with adequate fulness, the period from 
the rise of the Gracchi to the ascent of the 
throne by Augustus, but it does not contain the 
views, nor is it dictated by the practical ac- 
quaintance with human affairs which is neces- 
sary for a real history of Roman policy. The 
Scotch professor has, with much ability, illus- 
trated the contests of Sylla and Marius, of Cae- 
sar and Pompey ; but he lived in a pacific age, 
amidst the unbroken seclusion of an academi- 
cal life, and, consequently, could not possibly 
attain those clear and decisive views of the 
tendency and springs of action, in civil con- 
tests, which are brought home to the minds of 
the most illiterate by the storms and crimes of 
a revolution. 

Niebuhr is universally allowed to have 
opened a new era in the early history of the 
Republic. Before his time historians were 
content with adopting, without examination, 
the legends which, in the Roman annals, passed 
for the narrative of real events, and, despairing 
of adding any thing to their beauty, simply 
presented their readers with a translation of 
Livy and Dionysius. Dissatisfied with such a 
mode of recording the progress of so celebrated 
a people, Ferguson rejected the early legends 
altogether, and passing, in the most cursory 
and unsatisfactory manner over the first five 
hundred years of Roman story, professed him- 
self unable to discover firm historic ground till 
he came down to the second Punic war. But 
neither of these methods of treating the subject 
suited the searching eye and inquisitive mind 
of the German historian. Possessed of extraor- 
dinary learning, and a matchless faculty of 
drawing, with intuitive sagacity, important 
historical and political conclusions from de- 
tached and, to ordinary observers, unmeaning 
details of subordinate historians, he has con- 



trived to rear up from comparatively authentic 
data, a veracious picture of the early Roman 
annals. Instead of rejecting in despair the 
whole history prior to the invasion of the Gauls 
as a mass of fables, erected by the vanity of pa- 
trician families, and adopted by the credulity 
of an uninformed people, he has succeeded in 
supporting a large portion of those annals by 
unquestionable evidence ; and stripping it only, 
in some parts, of those colours which the elo- 
quence of Livy has rendered immortal, for the 
improvement and delight of mankind. It is a 
common reproach against this great antiquary, 
that he has overthrown the whole early history 
of Rome, but no reproach was ever more un- 
founded. In truth, as Dr. Arnold has justly 
observed, it must be evident to every one ac- 
quainted with the subject, that he has built up 
much more than he has destroyed, and fixed on 
firm historic grounds a vast deal which the in- 
quisitive eye of modern skepticism was in- 
clined to lay aside as entirely fictitious. No 
stronger proof of this can be desired than is to 
be found in the fact, that while Ferguson began 
his history as authentic only with the exploits 
of Hannibal, Niebuhr has deemed it certain 
that historical truth is to be found not only 
under the kings, but so early as Ancus Martius. 

It is inconceivable, indeed, how it ever could 
have been seriously believed that the annals 
of the kings were entirely fictitious, when the 
Cloaca Maxima still exists, a durable monu- 
ment both of the grandeur of conception and 
power of execution which at that early period 
had distinguished the Roman people. Two 
thousand five hundred years have elapsed 
since this stupendous work was executed, to 
drain the waters of the Forum and adjacent 
hollows to the Tiber; and there it stands at 
this day, without a stone displaced, still per- 
forming its destined service ! Do any of the 
edifices of Paris or London promise an equal 
duration? From the moment that we beheld 
that magnificent structure, formed of the actual 
stone of the eternal city, all doubts as to the 
authenticity of Roman annals, so far, at least, 
as they portray a powerful flourishing kingdom 
anterior to the Republic, vanished from our 
minds. If nothing else remained to attest the 
greatness of the kings at this period but the 
Cloaca Maxima and the treaty with Carthage 
in the first year of the Republic, it would be 
sufficient to demonstrate that the basis of the 
early history of the kings was to be found in 
real events. And this Niebuhr, after the most 
minute and critical examination, has declared 
to be his conviction. 

Doubtless, the same historic evidence does 
not exist for the romantic and captivating part 
of early Roman history. We cannot assert 
that we have good evidence that Romulus 
fought, or that Numa prayed; that Ancus con- 
quered, or that Tarquin oppressed; that the 
brethren of the Horatii saved their country, or 
Curtius leaped headlong into the gulf in the 
Forum. The exquisite story of Lucretia; the 
heart-stirring legend of Corioli ; the invasion 
of Porsenna, the virtue of Cincinnatus, the 
siege of Veias, the deliverance of Camillus, are 
probably all founded in some degree on real 
events, but they have come down to our times 



ARNOLD'S ROME. 



205 



glowing with the genius of the ancient histori- 
ans, and gilded by the colours which matchless 
eloquence has communicated to the additions 
with which the fondness of national or family 
vanity had clothed the artless narrative of 
early times. Simplicity is the invariable cha- 
racteristic of the infancy of the world. Homel- 
and Job are often in the highest degree both 
pathetic and sublime; but they are so just 
because they are utterly unconscious of any 
such merits, and aimed only at the recital of 
real events. The glowing pages and beautiful 
episodes of Livy are as evidently subsequent 
additions as the pomp and majesty of Ossian 
are to the meager ballads of Caledonia. 

But it is of no moment either to the great 
objects of historical inquiry or the future 
improvement and elevation of the species, 
whether the Roman legends can or cannot be 
supported by historical evidence. It is suffi- 
cient that they exist, to render them to the end 
of the world the most delightful subject of study 
for youth, not the least useful matter for con- 
templation in maturer years. They may not 
be strictly historical, but rely upon it they are 
founded in the main upon a correct picture of 
the manners and ideas of the time. Amadis 
of Gaul is not a true story, but it conveys, 
nevertheless, a faithful though exaggerated 
picture of the ideas and manners of the chi- 
valrous ages. There is, probably, the same 
truth in the Roman legends that there is in 
Achilles and Agamemnon — in Front de Boenf, 
Richard Coeur de Lion, and Ivanhoe. We will 
not find in Roman story a real Lucretia or Vir- 
ginia, any more than in British history a 
genuine Rebecca or Jeanie Deans; but the 
characters are not the less founded in the 
actual manners and spirit of the times. It is 
of little moment to us whether Romulus watch- 
ed the twelve emblematic vultures on the Pa- 
latine Hill, or Numa consulted Egeria in the 
shades of the Campagna, or Veia? was stormed 
through the mine sprung in the Temple of 
Juno, or the Roman ambassador thrust his 
hand into the fire before Porsenna, or Lucretia, 
though guiltless in intent, plunged the dagger 
in her bosom rather than survive the honour 
of her house. It is sufficient that a people 
have existed, to whom the patriotic devotion, 
the individual heroism, the high resolves, the 
undaunted resolution portrayed in these im- 
mortal episodes, were so familiar, that they 
had blended with real events, were believed to 
be true, because they were felt to be credible, 
and formed part of their traditional annals. 
No other people ever possessed early legends 
of the same noble, heart-stirring kind as the 
Romans, because none other were stamped 
with the character destined to win, and worthy 
to hold, the empire of the world. To the latest 
times the history of infant Rome, with all its 
attendant legends, must, therefore, form the 
most elevating and useful subject for the in- 
struction of youth, as affording a faithful 
picture, if not of the actual events of that in- 
teresting period, at least of the ideas and feel- 
ings then prevalent amongst a nation called to 
such exalted destinies; and without being em- 
bued with a similar spirit, we may safely assert 



no other people will ever either emulate their 
fame, or approach to their achievements. 

Notwithstanding the high place which we 
have assigned to Niebuhr in the elucidation 
and confirmation of early Roman history, 
nothing can be more apparent than that his 
work never will take its place as a popular 
history of the Republic, and never rival in 
general estimation the fascinating pages of 
Livy. No one can read it for half an hour 
without being satisfied of that fact. Invalu- 
able to the scholar, the antiquary, the philolo- 
gist, it has no charms for the great mass of 
readers, and conveys no sort of idea to the un- 
learned student of the consecutive chain of 
events even among the very people whose his- 
tory it professes to portray. In this respect it 
labours under the same fault which is, in a less 
degree, conspicuous in the philosophic pages 
of Sir James Mackintosh's English history ; 
that it pre-supposes an intimate acquaintance 
with the subject in the reader, and is to all, 
not nearly as well versed in it as himself, 
either in great part unintelligible, or intolerably 
dull. Heeren, whose labours have thrown 
such a flood of light on the Persian, Egyptian, 
and Carthaginian states, has justly remarked 
that Niebuhr, with all his acuteness, is to be 
regarded rather as an essayist on history, than 
an actual historian. He has elucidated with 
extraordinary learning and skill several of the 
most obscure subjects in Roman annals ; and 
on many, especially the vital subjects of the 
Agrarian law, struck out new lights, which, if 
known at all to the later writers of the empire, 
had been entirely lost during the change of 
manners and ideas consequent on the Gothic 
conquests. But his work is in many places 
so obscure, and so much overloaded with 
names, and subjects, and disquisitions, in great 
part unknown to readers, even of fair classi- 
cal attainments and extensive general know- 
ledge, that it never can take its place among 
the standard histories of the world. He is 
totally destitute of two qualities indispensable 
to a great historian, and particularly conspi- 
cuous in the far-famed annalists of antiquity 
— powers of description, and the discriminat- 
ing eye, which, touching on every subject, 
brings those prominently forward only which, 
from their intrinsic importance, should attract 
the attention of the reader. He works out 
every thing with equal care and minuteness, 
and, in consequence, the impression produced 
on the mind of an ordinary reader, is so con- 
fused, as to amount almost to nothing. Like 
Perele or Waterloo, in the imitation of nature, 
(and landscape painting, and historical de- 
scription in this particular are governed by the 
same principles,) he works out the details of 
each individual object with admirable skill ; 
but there is no breadth of general effect on his 
canvas, and he wants the general shade and 
subdued tones, which in Claude, amidst an in- 
finity of details, not less faithfully portrayed, 
rivet the eye of the spectator on a few brilliant 
spots, and produce on the mind even of the 
most unskilled the charm of a single emotion. 

Niebuhr's history, however, with all its me- 
rits and defects, comes only down to the com 
S 



206 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



mencement of the most important era in the 
annals of the republic. It is in the empire that 
the great want of continued annals is felt. Li- 
terally speaking, there is nothing, either in 
ancient or modern literature, which deserves 
the name of a history of the whole period of 
the emperors. Tillemont has, with unwearied 
industry and admirable accuracy, collected 
all that the inimitable fragments of Tacitus, 
and detached lights of Seutonius, Florus, and 
the panegyrists have left on this vast subject; 
and Gibbon has, with incomparable talent, 
thrown, in his first chapters, over the general 
conditions of the empire, the light of his ge- 
nius and the colouring of his eloquence. But 
Tillemont, though a laborious and valuable 
compiler, is no historian ; if any one doubts 
this, let him take up one of his elaborate 
quartos and try to read it. Gibbon, in his im- 
mortal work, the greatest monument of his- 
torical industry and ability that exists in the 
world, has given a most luminous view of the 
events which led to the decline and fall of the 
empire, and erected, with consummate talent, 
a bridge across the gulf which separates an- 
cient from modern story. But he begins only 
to narrate events with any minuteness at the 
period when the empire had already attained 
to its highest elevation ; he dismisses in a few 
pages the conquests of Trajan, the wisdom of 
Nerva, the beneficence of Marcus Aurelius, 
and enters into detail for the first time, when 
the blind partiality of Marcus Antoninus, and 
the guilt of his empress, had prepared in the 
accession and vices of Commodus, the com- 
mencement of that long series of depraved 
emperors who brought about the ruin of the 
empire. What do we know of the conquests 
of Trajan, the wars of Severus, the victories 
of Aurelian! Would that the pencil of the 
author of the Decline and Fall had thrown 
over them the brilliant light which it has shed | 
over the disasters or Julian, the storming of 
Constantinople, the conquests of Mahomet, or 
the obstinate wars of the Byzantine emperors 
with the Parthian princes. But his history 
embraces so vast a range of objects, that it 
could not satisfy our curiosity on the annals 
even of the people who formed the centre of 
the far-extended group, and it is rather a pic- 
ture of the progress of the nations who over- 
threw Rome, than of Rome itself. 

There is ample room, therefore, for a great 
historical work, as voluminous and as elo- 
quent as Gibbon, on the Rise and Progress of 
Roman greatness; and it embraces topics of 
far more importance, in the present age of the 
world, than the succession of disasters and 
fierce barbarian inroads which long shook, 
and at last overturned the enduring fabric of 
the empire. Except as a matter of curiosity, 
we have little connection with the progress of 
the Gothic and Scythian nations. Christianity 
has turned the rivers of barbarism by their 
source ; civilization has overspread the wilds 
of Scythia; gunpowder and fortified towns 
have given knowledge a durable superiority 
over ignorance ; Russia stands as an impene- 
trable barrier between Europe and the Tartar 
horse. But the evils which the Roman insti- 
tutions contained in their own bosom, as well 



as the deeds of glory and extent of dominion 
to which they led, interest us in the most vital 
particulars. Our institutions more closely re- 
semble theirs than those of any other people 
recorded in history, and the causes which have 
led to the vast extent of our dominion and du- 
rability of our power, are the same which gave 
them for centuries the empire of the world. 
The same causes of weakness, also, are now 
assailing us which once destroyed them ; we, 
too, have wealth imported from all parts of the 
world to corrupt our manners, and an over- 
grown metropolis to spread the seeds of vice 
and effeminacy, as from a common centre, 
over the length and breadth of the land; we, 
too, have patricians striving to retain power 
handed down to them by their ancestors, and 
plebeians burning with the desire of distinc- 
tion, and the passion for political elevation 
which springs from the spread of opulence 
among the middle classes ; we, too, have Grac- 
chi ready to hoist the standard of disunion 
by raising the question of the Agrarian law, 
and Syllas and Mariuses to rear their hostile 
banners at the head of the aristocratic and de- 
mocratic factions ; in the womb of time, is 
provided for us as for them, the final over- 
throw of our liberties, under the successful 
leader of the popular party, and long ages of 
decline under the despotic rule imposed upon 
us by the blind ambition and eastern equality 
of the people. A fair and philosophic history 
of Rome, therefore, is a subject of incalculable 
importance to the citizens of this, and of every 
other constitutional monarchy ; in their errors 
we may discern the mirror of our own — in 
their misfortunes the prototypes of those we 
are likely to undergo — in their fate, that which, 
in all human probability, awaits ourselves. 

Such a history never, in modern times, could 
have been written but at this period. All sub- 
sequent ages, from the days of Cicero, have 
been practically ignorant of the very elements 
of political knowledge requisite for a right 
understanding or fair discussion of the sub- 
ject. In vain were the lessons of political wis- 
dom to be found profusely scattered through 
the Roman historians — in vain did Sallust and 
Tacitus point, by a word or an epithet, to the 
important conclusions deducible from their 
civil convulsions ; — the practical experience, 
the daily intercourse with republican institu- 
tions were awanting, which were necessary to 
give the due weight to their reflections. The 
lessons of political wisdom were so constantly 
brought home to the citizens of antiquity by the 
storms and dissensions of the Forum, that they 
deemed it unnecessary to do more than allude 
to them, as a subject on Avhich all were agreed, 
and with which every one was familiar. Like 
first principles in our House of Commons, they 
were universally taken for granted, and, there- 
fore, never made the theme of serious illustra- 
tion. It is now only that we begin to perceive 
the weighty sense and condensed wisdom of 
many expressions which dropped seemingly 
unconsciously from their historical writers, 
that dear-bought experience has taught us that 
pride, insolency, and corrupt principles are the 
main sources of popular ambition in our times, 
as in the days of Catiline ; and that the saying 



ARNOLD'S ROME. 



207 



of Johnson ceases to pass for a witty paradox: 
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." 

Dr. Arnold has now fairly set himself to 
work with this noble task, and he is, in many 
respects, peculiarly fitted for the undertaking. 
Long known to the classical world as an ac- 
complished scholar, and the learned editor of 
the best edition of Thucydides extant, he is 
still more familiar to many of our readers as 
the energetic head-master of Rugby school ; 
and is to this hour looked up to with mingled 
sentiments of awe and affection by many of 
the most celebrated characters of the age. 
The first volume of the great work in which 
he is engaged alone is published, which brings 
down the history of the Republic to the burn- 
ing of Rome by the Goths, but it affords a fair 
specimen of the spirit and ability with which 
the remainder is likely to be carried on. In 
many respects he has shown himself ad- 
mirably calculated for the great but difficult 
task which he has undertaken. His classical 
attainments, both in Greek and Roman litera- 
ture, are of the very highest order; his indus- 
try is indefatigable, and he possesses much of 
that instinctive glance or natural sagacity 
which enabled Niebuhr, amidst the fictions 
and chaos of ancient annals, to fix at once on 
the outlines of truth and the course of real 
events. His powers of description are of no 
ordinary kind, as our readers will at once per- 
ceive from the extracts we are about to lay be- 
fore them; and many of his reflections prove 
that he is endowed with that faculty of draw- 
ing general conclusions from particular events, 
which, when not pushed too far, is the surest 
sign of the real genius for philosophical his- 
tory. 

Dr. Arnold, it is well known, is a whig — per- 
haps, we may add, an ultra-liberal. So far 
from objecting to his book on this account, we 
hail it with the more satisfaction that it does 
come from an author of such principles, and 
therefore that it can safely be referred to as a 
work in which the truth of ancient events is 
not likely to be disguised or perverted to an- 
swer the views at least of the conservative party 
in Great Britain. We are satisfied from many 
instances, in the volume before us, that he is 
of an inquisitive, searching turn of mind, and 
that he would deem himself dishonoured if 
he concealed or altered any well-ascertained 
facts in Roman history. More than this we do 
not desire. We not only do not dislike, we 
positively enjoy, his occasional introduction of 
liberal views in what we may call Bom an poli- 
tics. We see in them the best guarantee that 
the decisive instances against democratic prin- 
ciples, with which all ancient history, and, most 
of all, Roman history, abounds, will not be per- 
verted in his hands, and may be relied on as 
authentic facts against his principles. Pro- 
vided a writer is candid, ingenuous, and liberal, 
we hold it perfectly immaterial to the ultimate 
triumph of truth what is the shade of his poli- 
tical opinions. The cause is not worth defend- 
ing which cannot be supported by the testimony 
of an honest opponent. Every experienced 
lawyer knows the value of a conscientious 
but unwilling witness. Enough is to be found 
in their apologist, Thiers, to doom the French 



Revolution to the eternal execration of mankind. 
There is no writer on America who has brought 
forward such a host of facts decisive against 
republican institutions as Miss Martineau, 
whom the liberals extol as the only author who 
has given a veracious account of the transat- 
lantic democracies ; and we desire no other 
witness but Dr. Arnold to the facts which de- 
monstrate that it was the extravagant preten- 
sion and ambition of the commons, which, in 
the end, proved fatal to the liberties of Rome. 

The Campagna of Rome, the fields of Latium, 
the Alban Mount, the Palatine Hill, were fami- 
liar to the childhood of us all ; and not the least 
delightful hours of the youth of many of us 
have been spent in exploring the realities of 
that enchanting region. We transcribe with 
pleasure Dr. Arnold's animated and correct 
description of it, drawn from actual observa- 
tion with the hand of a master. 

" The territory of the original Rome during 
its first period, the true Ager Romanus, could be 
gone round in a single day. It did not extend 
beyond the Tiber at all, nor probably beyond 
the Anio; and on the east and south, where it 
had most room to spread, its limit was between 
five and six miles from the city. This Ager 
Romanus was the exclusive property of the 
Roman people, that is of the houses ; it did not 
include the lands conquered from the Latins, 
and given back to them again when the Latins 
became the plebs or commons of Rome. Ac- 
cording to the augurs, the Ager Romanus was 
a peculiar district in a religious sense; aus- 
pices could be taken within its bounds which 
could be taken nowhere without them. 

"And now, what was Rome, and what was 
the country around it, which have both acquired 
an interest such as can cease only when earth 
itself shall perish 1 The hills of Rome are such 
as we rarely see in England, low in height, but 
with steep and rocky sides. In early times the 
natural wood still remained in patches amidst 
the buildings, as at this day it grows here and 
there on the green sides of the Monte Testaceo. 
Across the Tiber the ground rises to a greater 
height than that of the Roman hills, but its 
summit is a level, unbroken line; while the 
heights, which opposite to Rome itself rise im- 
mediately from the river, under the names of 
Janiculus and Vaticanus, then swept away to 
some distance from it, and return in their high- 
est and boldest form at the Mons Marius, just 
above the Milvian bridge and the Flaminian 
road. Thus to the west the view is immedi- 
ately bounded; but to the north and north-east 
the eye ranges over the low ground of the Cam- 
pagna to the nearest line of the Apennines, 
which closes up, as with a gigantic wall, all 
the Sabine, Latin, and Volcian lowlands, while 
over it are still distinctly to be seen the high 
summits of the central Apennines, covered 
with snow, even at this day, for more than six 
months in the year. South and south-west lies 
the wide plain of the Campagna; its level line 
succeeded by the equally level line of the sea, 
which can only be distinguished from it by the 
brighter light reflected from its waters. East- 
ward, after ten miles of plain, the view is bound- 
ed by the Alban hills, a cluster of high bold 
points rising out of the Campagna, like Arran 



208 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



from the sea, on the highest of which, at nearly 
the same height with the summit of Helvellyn, 
stood the Temple of Jupiter Latiaris, the scene 
of the common worship of all the people of the 
Latin name. Immediately under this highest 
point lies the crater-like basin of the Alban 
lake; and on its nearer rim might be seen the 
trees of the grove of Florentia, where the Latins 
held the great civil assemblies of their nation. 
Further to the north, on the edge of the Alban 
hills, looking towards Rome, was the town and 
citadel of Tusculum ; and beyond this, a lower 
summit, crowned with the walls and towers of 
Labicum, seems to connect the Alban hills with 
the line of the Apennines just at the spot where 
the citadel of Prasneste, high up on the moun- 
tain side, marks the opening into the country 
of the Hernicians, and into the valleys of the 
streams that feed the Liris. 

" Returning nearer to Rome, the lowlnnd coun- 
try of the Campagna is broken by long green 
swelling ridges, the ground rising and falling, 
as in the heath country of Surrey and Berk- 
shire. The streams are dull and sluggish, but 
the hill sides above them constantly break away 
into little rocky cliffs, where on every ledge the 
wild fig now strikes out its branches, and tufts 
of broom are clustering, but which in old times 
formed the natural strength of the citadels of 
the numerous cities of Latium. Except in 
these narrow dells, the present aspect of the 
country is all bare and desolate, with no trees 
nor any human habitation. But anciently, in 
the time of the early kings of Rome, it was full 
of independent cities, and, in its population and 
the careful cultivation of its little garden-like 
farms, must have resembled the most flourish- 
ing parts of Lombardy or the Netherlands." 

We have already adverted to the difficulty of 
determining where fiction ends and real history 
begins in the early Roman annals, and the' scan- 
ty foundation there is in authentic records, for 
any of the early legends of their history. Fully 
alive, however, to the exquisite beauty of these 
remains, and the influence they had on the Ro- 
man history, as well as their importance as 
evincing the lofty character of their infant peo- 
ple, Dr. Arnold has adopted the plan of not re- 
jecting them altogether, but giving them in a 
simple narrative, something like the Bible, and 
commencng with his ordinary style when he 
arrives at events which really rest on historic 
ground. This is certainly much better than 
entirely rejecting them; but, at the same time, 
it introduces a quaint style of writing, in re- 
counting these early events, to which we can 
hardly reconcile ourselves, afterthe rich colour- 
ing and graphic hand of Livy. As an example 
of the way in which he treats this interesting 
but difficult part of his subject, we give his ac- 
count of the story of Lucretia, the exquisite 
episode with which Livy terminates his first 
book and narrative of the kings of Rome. 

"Now when they came back to Rome, Kins 
Tarquinius was at war with the people of Ar- 
dea; and as the city was strong, his army lay 
a long while before it, till it should be forced to 
yield through famine. So the Romans had lei- 
sure for feasting and for diverting themselves : 
and once Titus and Aruns were supping with 
their brother Sextus, and their cousin Tarqui- 



nius of Collatia was supping with them. And 
they disputed about their wives, whose wife of 
them all was the worthiest lady. Then said 
Tarquinius of Collatia, ' Let us go and see with 
our own eyes what our wives are doing, so 
shall we know which is the worthiest.' Upon 
this they all mounted their horses and rode first 
to Rome ; and there they found the wives of Ti- 
tus, and of Aruns. and of Sextus, feasting and 
making merry. Then they rode on to Collatia, 
and it was late in the night; but they found 
Lucretia, the wife of Tarquinius of Collatia, 
neither feasting, nor yet sleeping, but she was 
sitting with all her handmaids around her, and 
all were working at the loom. So when they 
saw this, they all said, 'Lucretia is the worthi- 
est lady.' And she entertained her husband 
and his kinsmen, and after that they rode back 
to the camp before Ardea. 

"But a spirit of wicked passion seized upon 
Sextus, and a few days afterwards he went alone 
to Collatia, and Lucretia received him hospita- 
bly, for he was her husband's kinsman. At 
midnight he arose and went to her chamber, 
and he said that if she yielded not to him he 
would slay her and one of her slaves with her, 
and would say to her husband that he had slain 
her in her adultery. So when Sextus had ac- 
complished his wicked purpose he went back 
again to the camp. 

"Then Lucretia sent in haste to Rome, to 
pray that her father Spurius Lucretius would 
come to her ; and she sent to Ardea to summon 
her husband. Her father brought along with 
him Publius Valerius, and her husband brought 
with him Lucius Junius, whom men called 
Brutus. When they arrived, they asked ear- 
nestly, 'Is all well!' Then she told them of 
the wicked deed of Sextus, and she said, ' If ye 
be men, avenge it.' And they all swore to her, 
that they would avenge it. Then she said again, 
'I am not guilty; yet must I too share in 
the punishment of this deed, lest any should 
think that they may be false to their husbands 
and live.' And she drew a knife from her 
bosom, and stabbed herself to the heart. 

" At that sight her husband and her father 
cried aloud ; but Lucius drew the knife from 
the wound, and held it up, and said, ' By this 
blood I swear that I will visit this deed upon 
King Tarquinius, and all his accursed race ; 
neither shall any man hereafter be king in 
Rome, lest he do the like wickedness.' And he 
gave the knife to her husband, and to her fa- 
ther, and to Publius Valerius. They marvel- 
led to hear such words from him whom men 
called dull ; but they swore also, and they took 
up the body of Lucretia, and carried it down 
into the forum; and they said, 'Behold the 
deeds of the wicked family of Tarquinius.' 
All the people of Collatia were moved, and 
the men took up arms, and they set a guard at 
the gates, that none might go out to carry the 
tidings to Tarquinius, and they followed Lu- 
cius to Rome. There, too, all the people came 
together, and the crier summoned them to as- 
semble before the tribune of the Celeres, for 
Lucius held that office. And Lucius spoke to 
them of all the tyranny of Tarquinius and his 
sons, and of the wicked deed of Sextus. And 
the people in their curiae took back from Tar- 



ARNOLD'S ROME. 



209 



quinius the sovereign power, which they had 
given him, and they banished him and all his 
family. Then the younger men followed Lu- 
cius to Ardea, to win over the army there to 
join them ; and the city was left in the charge 
of Spnrius Lucretius. But the wicked Tullia 
fled in haste from her house, and all, both men 
and women, cursed her as she passed, and 
prayed that the furies of her father's blood 
might visit her with vengeance. 

"Meanwhile King Tarquinius set out with 
speed to Rome to put down the tumult. But 
Lucius turned aside from the road that he 
might not meet him, and came to the camp ; 
and the soldiers joyfully received him, and 
they drove out the sons of Tarquinius. King 
Tarquinius came to Rome, but the gates were 
shut, and they declared to him from the walls 
the sentence of banishment which had been 
passed against him and his family. So he 
yielded to his fortune, and went to live at Ca?re 
with his sons Titus and Aruns. His other 
son, Sextus, went to Gabii, and the people 
there, remembering how he had betrayed them 
to his father, slew him. Then the army left 
the camp before Ardea and went back to Rome. 
And all men said, ' Let us follow the good laws 
of the good King Servius ; and let us meet in 
our centuries, according as he directed, and 
let us choose two men year by year to govern 
us, instead of a king.' Then the people met 
in their centuries in the field of Mars, and 
they chose two men to rule over them, Lucius 
Junius, whom men called Brutus, and Lucius 
Tarquinius of Collatia." 

Every classical reader must perceive the 
object which our author had in view. He has 
in great part translated Livy, and he wishes to 
preserve the legend which he has "endered im- 
mortal; but he is desirous, at the same time, 
of doing it, as he himself tells us, in such a 
manner that it shall be impossible for any 
reader, even the most illiterate, to imagine that 
he is recording a real event. It may be pre- 
judice, and the force of early association, but 
we can hardly reconcile ourselves to this Mo- 
saic mode of writing the history of the most 
remote events. Every author's style, to be 
agreeable, should be natural. The reader ex- 
periences a disagreeable feeling in coming 
upon such quaint and perhaps affected pas- 
sages, after being habituated to the flowing and 
vigorous style of the author. It would be bet- 
ter, we conceive, to write the whole in one 
uniform manner, and mark the difference be- 
tween the legendary and authentic parts by a 
difference in the type, or some other equally 
obvious distinction. But this is a trivial mat- 
ter, affecting only the commencement of the 
work; and ample subject of meditation is sug- 
gested by many facts and passages in its later 
pact's. 

We have previously noticed the decisive 
evidence which the Cloaca Maxima and the 
treaty with Carthage in the time of Tarquin 
afford of the early greatness of the Roman 
monarchy. But we were not aware, till read- 
ing Arnold — evenNiebuhr has not so distinctly 
brought out the fact — that at the time of the 
expulsion of the Tarquins and the commence- 
ment of the Republic, Rome was already a 
27 



powerful monarchy, whose sway extended 
from the northern extremity of the Campagna 
to the rocks of Terracina; and that it was 
then more powerful than it ever was for the 
first hundred and fifty years of the Com- 
monwealth ! The Roman kingdom is com- 
pared by Arnold, under the last of the kings, 
to Judea under Solomon : and the fact of a 
treaty, recorded in Polybius, being in that year 
concluded with Carthage, proves that the state 
had already acquired consideration with dis- 
tant states. 

" Setting aside," says our author, "the tyran- 
ny ascribed to Tarquinius, and remembering 
that it was his policy to deprive the commons 
of their lately acquired citizenship, and to 
treat them like subjects rather than members 
of the state, the picture given of the wealth 
and greatness of Judea under Solomon may 
convey some idea of the state of Rome under 
its latter kings. Powerful amongst surround- 
ing nations, exposed to no hostile invasions, 
with a flourishing agriculture and an active 
commerce, the country was great and pros- 
perous ; and the king was enabled to execute 
public works of the highest magnificence, and 
to invest himself with a splendour unknown in 
the earlier times of the monarchy." 

But mark the effect upon the external power 
and internal liberties of the nation, conse- 
quent on the violent change in the govern- 
ment and establishment of the Commonwealth, 
as portrayed in the authentic pages of this 
liberal historian. 

" In the first year of the commonwealth, the 
Romans still possessed the dominion enjoyed 
by their kings ; all the cities of the coast of 
Latium, as we have already seen, were subject 
to them as far as Terracina. Within twelve 
years, rve cannot certainly say how much sooner, these 
were all become independent. This is easily in- 
telligible, if we only take into account the loss 
to Rome of an able and absolute king, the na- 
tural weakness of an unsettled government, 
and the distractions produced by the king's at- 
tempts to recover his throne. The Latins may 
have held, as we are told of the Sabines in 
this very time, that their dependent alliance 
with Rome had been concluded with King 
Tarquinius, and that as he was king no longer, 
and as his sons had been driven out with him, 
all covenants between Latium and Rome were 
become null and void. But it is possible also, 
if the chronology of the common story of 
these times can be at all depended on, that the 
Latin cities owed their independence to the 
Etruscan conquest of Rome. For that war, 
which has been given in its poetical version 
as the war with Porsenna, was really a great 
outbreak of the Etruscan power upon the na- 
tions southward of Etruria, in the very front 
of whom lay the Romans. In the very next 
year after the expulsion of the king, according 
to the common story, and certainly at some 
time within the period with which we are now 
concerned, the Etruscans fell upon Rome. The 
result of the war is, indeed, as strangely dis- 
guised in the poetical story as Charlemagne's 
invasion of Spain is in the romances. Rome 
was completely conquered; all the territory 
which the kings had won on the right bank of 
s2 



210 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



the Tiber was now lost. Rome itself was sur- 
rendered to the Etruscan conqueror; his sove- 
reignty was fully acknowledged, the Romans 
gave up their arms, and recovered their city 
and territory on condition of renouncing the 
use of iron except for implements of agricul- 
ture. But this bondage did not last long ; the 
Etruscan power was broken by a great defeat 
sustained before Aricia ; for after the fall of 
Rome the conquerors attacked Latium, and 
while besieging Aricia, the united force of the 
Latin cities, aided by the Greeks of Cumce, 
succeeded in destroying their army, and in 
confining their power to their own side of the 
Tiber. Still, however, the Romans did not re- 
cover their territory on the right bank of that 
river, and the number of their tribes, as has 
been already noticed, was consequently less- 
ened by one-third, being reduced from thirty to 
twenty. 

"Thus within a short time after the banish- 
ment of the last king, the Romans lost all their 
territory on the Etruscan side of the Tiber, 
and all their dominion over Latium. A third 
people were their immediate neighbours on 
the north-east, the Sabines. The cities of the 
Sabines reached, says Varro, from Reate, to 
the distance of half a day's journey from 
Rome; that is, according to the varying esti- 
mate of a day's journey, either seventy-five 
or an hundred stadia, about ten or twelve 
miles. 

"It is certain, also, that the first enlarge- 
ment of the Roman territory, after its great 
diminution in the Etruscan war, took place 
towards the north-east, between the Tiber and 
the Anio ; and here were the lands of the only 
new tribes that were added to the Roman na- 
tion, for the space of more than one hundred 
and twenty years after the establishment of 
the commonwealth." 

Such were the disastrous effects of the re- 
volution which expelled Taiquinius Superbus, 
even though originating, if we may believe the 
story of Lucretia, in a heinous crime on his 
part, on the external power and territorial 
possessions of Rome. Let us next inquire 
whether the social condition of the people was 
improved by the change, and the plebeians 
reaped those fruits from the violent change of 
the government which they were doubtless led 
to expect. 

"The most important part," says Arnold, 
" in the history of the first years of the com- 
monwealth is the tracing, if possible, the gra- 
dual depression of the commons to that ex- 
treme point of misery which led to the institu- 
tion of the tribunalship. We have seen that 
immediately after the expulsion of the king, 
the commons shared in the advantages of the 
revolution ; but within a few years we find 
them so oppressed and powerless, that their 
utmost hopes aspired, not to the assertion of 
political equality with the burghers, but mere- 
ly to the obtaining protection from personal 
injuries. 

" The specific character of their degradation 
is stated to have been this ; that there pre- 
vailed among them severe distress, amounting 
in many cases to actual ruin ; that to relieve 
themselves from their poverty, they were in 



the habit of borrowing money of the burghers ; 
that the distress continuing, they became ge- 
nerally insolvent; and that as the law of 
debtor and creditor was exceedingly severe, 
they became liable in their persons to the 
cruelty of the burghers, were treated by them as 
slaves, confined as such in their workhouses, 
kept to taskwork, and often beaten at the dis- 
cretion of their task-masters." 

Various were the miseries to which the 
commons were reduced in consequence of 
the revolution, and inexorable the rigour with 
which the nobles pressed the advantage they 
had gained by the abolition of the kingly form 
of government. The civil convulsions and 
general distress, Dr. Arnold tells us, terminated 
in the establishment of an exclusive oppressive 
aristocracy, interrupted occasionally by the le- 
galized despotism of a single individual. 

" Thus the monarchy was exchanged for an 
exclusive aristocracy, in which the burghers or 
patricians possessed the whole dominion of the 
state. For mixed as was the influence in the 
assembly of the centuries, and although the 
burghers through their clients exercised no 
small control over it, still they did not think it 
safe to intrust it with much power. In the 
election of consuls, the centuries could only 
choose out of a number of patrician or burgher 
candidates; and even after this election it re- 
mained for the burghers in their great council 
in the curiae to ratify it or to annul it, by con- 
ferring upon, or refusing to the persons so 
elected the ' Imperium ;' in other words, that 
sovereign power which belonged to the con- 
suls as the successors of the kings, and which, 
except so far as it was limited within the walls 
of the city, and a circle of one mile without 
them, by the right of appeal, was absolute over 
life and death. As for any legislative power, 
in this period of the commonwealth, the con- 
suls were their own law. No doubt the burgh- 
ers had their customs, which in all great 
points the consuls would duly observe, be- 
cause, otherwise on the expiration of their 
office they would be liable to arraignment be- 
fore the curice, and to such punishment as 
that sovereign assembly might please to inflict; 
but the commons had no such security, and 
the uncertainty of the consul's judgments wag 
the particular grievance which afterwards led 
to the formation of the code of the twelve 
tables. 

" We are told, however, that within ten years 
of the first institution of the consuls the burgle 
cm found it necessary to create a single magistrate 
with powers still more absolute, who was to exer- 
cise the full sovereignty of a king, and even 
without that single check to which the kings of Rome 
had been subjected. The Master of the people, 
that is, of the burghers, or, as he was other- 
wise called, the Dictator, was appointed, it is 
true, for six months only ; and therefore liable, 
like the consuls, to be arraigned after the ex- 
piration of his office, for any acts of tyranny 
which he might have committed during its 
continuance. But whilst he retained his of- 
fice he was as absolute without the walls of the 
city as the consuls were within them ; neither 
commoners nor burghers had any right of ap- 
peal from his sentence, although the latter had 



ARNOLD'S ROME. 



211 



enjoyed this protection in the times of the mo- 1 
narchy." 

At length the misery of the people, flowing 
from the revolution, became so excessive that 
they could endure it no longer, and they took 
the resolution to separate altogether from their 
oppressors, and retire to the sacred hill to found 
a new commonwealth. 

" Fifteen years after the expulsion of Tar- 
quinius, the commons, driven to despair by 
their distress, and exposed without protection 
to the capricious cruelty of the burghers, re- 
solved to endure their degraded state no longer. 
The particulars of this second revolution are 
as uncertain as those of the overthrow of the 
monarchy ; but thus much is certain, and is 
remarkable, that the commons sought safety, 
not victory; they desired to escape from Rome, 
not to govern it. It may be true that the com- 
mons who were left in Rome gathered together 
on the Aventine, the quarter appropriated to 
their order, and occupied the hill as a fortress ; 
but it is universally agreed that the most effi- 
cient part of their body, who were at that time 
in the field as soldiers, deserted their generals, 
and marched off to a hill beyond the Anio ; that 
is, to a spot beyond the limits of the Ager Ro- 
manus, the proper territory of the burghers, 
but within the district which had been assigned 
to one of the newly created tribes of the com- 
mons, the Crustuminian. Here they establish- 
ed themselves, and here they proposed to found 
a new city of their own, to which they would 
have gathered their families, and the rest of 
their order who were left behind in Rome, and 
have given up their old city to its original pos- 
sessors, the burghers and their clients. But 
the burghers were as unwilling to lose the 
services of the commons, as the Egyptians in 
the like case to let the Israelites go, and they 
endeavoured by every means to persuade them 
to return. To show how little the commons 
thought of gaining political power, we have 
only to notice their demands. They required 
a general cancelling of the obligations of in- 
solvent debtors, and the release of all those 
whose persons, in default of payment, had 
been assigned over to the power of their credi- 
tors ; and further, they insisted on having two of 
their own body acknowledged by the burghers 
as their protectors ; and to make this protec- 
tion effectual, the persons of those who afforded 
it were to be as inviolable as those of the her- 
alds, the sacred messengers of the gods ; who- 
soever harmed them was to be held accursed, 
and might be slain by any one with impunity. 
To these terms the burghers agreed ; a solemn 
treaty was concluded between them and the 
commons, as between two distinct nations ; and 
the burghers swore for themselves, and for 
their posterity, that they would hold inviolable 
the persons of two officers, to be chosen by 
the centuries on the field of Mars, whose busi- 
ness it should be to extend full protection to 
any commoner against a sentence of the con- 
sul; that is to say, who might rescue any 
debtor from the power of his creditor, if they 
conceived it to be capriciously or cruelly exert- 
ed. The two officers thus chosen retained the 
name which the chief officers of the commons 
had borne before, — they were called Tribuni, 



or tribe masters; but instead of being merely 
the officers of one particular tribe, and exer- 
cising an authority only over the members of 
their own order, they were named tribunes of 
the commons at large, and their power, as 
protectors in stopping any exercise of oppres- 
sion towards their own body, extended over 
the burghers, and was by them solemnly ac- 
knowledged. The number of the tribunes was 
probably suggested by that of the consuls; 
there were to be two chief officers of the com- 
mons, as there were of the burghers." 

Thus, all that the Roman populace gained 
by the revolution which overturned the kingly 
power, was such a diminution of territory and 
external importance as it required them more 
than one hundred and fifty years to recover, 
and such an oppressive form of aristocratic 
government as compelled them to take refuge 
under a dictator, and led to such a degree of 
misery as, eighteen years after the convulsion, 
made them ready to quit their country and 
homes, and become exiles from their native 
land ! 

At the close of the third century of Rome, 
and fifty years after the expulsion of the Tar- 
quins, Arnold gives the following picture of 
the external condition of the Republic: 

"At the close of the third century of Rome, 
the warfare which the Romans had to main- 
tain against the Opican nations was generally 
defensive; that the iEquians and Volscians 
had advanced from the line of the Apennines 
and established themselves on the Alban hills, 
in the heart of Latium ; that of the thirty Latin 
states which had formed the league with Rome in 
the year 261, thirteen were now either destroy- 
ed, or were in the possession of the Opicans ; 
that on the Alban hills themselves, Tusculum 
alone remained independent; and that there 
was no other friendly city to obstruct the ir- 
ruptions of the enemy into the territory of 
Rome. Accordingly, that territory was plun- 
dered year after year, and whatever defeats 
the plunderers may at times have sustained, 
yet they were never deterred from renewing a 
contest which they found in the main profitable 
and glorious. So greatly had the power and do- 
minion of Rome fallen since the overthrow of the 
monarchy." 

It was by slow degrees, and in a long series 
of contests, continued without intermission for 
two hundred years, that the commons recover- 
ed the liberties they had lost from the conse- 
quences of this triumph in this first convul- 
sion ; so true it is, in all ages, that the people 
are not only never permanent gainers, but in 
the end the greatest losers by the revolution in 
which they had been most completely victorious. 

The next great social convulsion of Rome 
was that consequent on the overthrow of the 
Decemvirs. The success of that revolution 
operated in the end grievously to the prejudice 
of the commons, and retarded, by half a cen- 
tury, the advance of real freedom. Every one 
knows that the Decemvirs were elected to re^ 
model the laws of the commonwealth ; that 
they shamefully abused their trust, and con- 
stituted themselves tyrants without control; 
and that they were at last overthrown by the 
general and uncontrollable indignation excited 



212 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



by the atrocious violence of Appius to the 
daughter of Virginius. A juster cause for re- 
sistance, a fairer ground for the overthrow of 
existing authority, could not be imagined ; it 
was accordingly successful, and the immediate 
effect of the popular triumph was a very great 
accession of political power to the commons. 
Arnold tells us — 

" The revolution did not stop here. Other 
and deeper changes were effected ; but they 
lasted so short a lime, that their memory has 
almost vanished out of the records of history. 
The assembly of the tribes had been put on a 
level with that of the centuries, and the same 
principle was followed out in the equal divi- 
sion of all the magistracies of the state be- 
tween the patricians and the commons. Two 
supreme magistrates, invested with the high- 
est judicial power, and discharging also those 
important duties which were afterwards per- 
formed by the censors, were to be chosen every 
year, one from the patricians, and the other from 
the commons. Ten tribunes of the soldiers, 
or decemviri, chosen, five from the patricians 
and five from the commons, were to command 
the armies in war, and to watch over the rights 
of the patricians; while ten tribunes of the 
commons, also chosen in equal proportions 
from both orders, were to watch over the liber- 
ties of the commons. And as patricians were 
thus admitted to the old tribuneship, so the as- 
semblies of the tribes were henceforth, like 
those of the centuries, to be held under the 
sanctions of augury, and nothing could be de- 
termined in them if the auspices were unfa- 
vourable. Thus the two orders were to be 
made fully equal to one another; but at the 
same time they were to be kept perpetually dis- 
tinct ; for at this very moment the whole twelve 
tables of the laws of the decemvirs received 
the solemn sanction of the people, although, 
as we have seen, there was a law in one of 
the last tables which declared the marriage of 
a patrician with a plebeian to be unlawful. 

" There being thus an end of all exclusive 
magistracies, whether patrician or plebeian ; 
and all magistrates being now recognised as 
acting in the name of the whole people, the 
persons of all were to be regarded as equally 
sacred. Thus the consul Horatius proposed 
and carried a law which declared that, who- 
ever harmed any tribune of the commons, any 
sedile, any judge, or any decemvir, should be 
outlawed and accursed ; that any man might 
slay him, and that all his property should be 
confiscated to the temple of Ceres. Another 
law was passed by M. Duilius, one of the tri- 
bunes, carrying the penalties of the Valerian 
law to a greater height against any magistrate 
who should either neglect to have new magis- 
trates appointed at the end of the year, or who 
should create them without giving the right of 
appeal from their sentence. Whosoever vio- 
lated either of these provisions was to be 
burned alive as a public enemy. 

" Finally, in order to prevent the decrees of 
the senate from being tampered with by the 
patricians, Horatius and Valerius began the 
practice of having them carried to the temple 
of Ceres on the Aventine, and there laid up 
under the care of the asdiles of the commons. 



"This complete revolution was conducted 
chiefly, as far as appears, by the two consuls, 
and by M. Duilius. Of the latter we should 
wish to have some further knowledge ; it is an 
unsatisfactory history, in which we can only 
judge of the man from his public measures, 
instead of being enabled to form some estimate 
of the merit of his measures from our acquaint- 
ance with the character of the man. Eut there 
is no doubt that the new constitution attempted 
to obtain objects for which the time was not 
yet come, which were regarded rather as the 
triumph of a party, than as called for by the 
wants and feelings of the nation ; and therefore 
the Romau constitution of 306 was as short- 
lived as Simon de Montfort's provisions of Ox- 
ford, or as some of the strongest measures of 
the Long Parliament. An advantage pursued 
too far in politics, as well as in war, is apt to 
end in a repulse." 

After a continued struggle of seven years, 
however, this democratic constitution yielded 
to the reaction in favour of the old institutions 
of the state, and the experienced evils of the 
new, — and another constitution was the result 
of the struggle which restored matters to the 
same situation in which they had been before 
the overthrow of the Decemvirs ; with the ad- 
dition of a most important officer — the Censor, 
endowed with almost despotic power — to the 
patrician faction. This decided reaction is 
thus described, and the inferences deducible 
from it fairly stated by Dr. Arnold. 

" In the following year we meet for the first 
time with the name of a new patrician magis- 
tracy, the Censorship; and Niebuhr saw clear- 
ly that the creation of this office was connected 
with the appointment of tribunes of the sol- 
diers; and that both belong to what maybe 
called the constitution of the year 312. 

"This constitution recognised two points; 
a sort of continuation of the principle of the 
decemvirate, inasmuch as the supreme govern- 
ment was again, to speak in modern language, 
put in commission, and the kingly powers, 
formerly united in the consuls or praetors, 
were now to be divided between the censors 
and tribunes of the soldiers ; and secondly, the 
eligibility of the commons to share in some of 
the powers thus divided. But the partition, 
even in theory, was far from equal : the two 
censors, who were to hold their office for five 
years, were not only chosen from the patricians, 
but, as Niebuhr thinks, by them, that is, by 
the assembly of the curiae; the two quaestors, 
who judged in cases of blood, were also chosen 
from the patricians, although by the centuries. 
Thus the civil power of the old praetors was in 
its most important points still exercised ex- 
clusively by the patricians; and even their 
military power, which was professedly to be 
open to both orders, was not transmitted to the 
tribunes of the soldiers, without some diminu- 
tion of its majesty. The new tribuneship was 
not an exact image of the kingly sovereignty ; 
it was not a curule office, and therefore no tri- 
bune ever enjoyed the honour of a triumph, in 
which the conquering general, ascending to 
the Capitol to sacrifice to the guardian gods 
of Rome, was wont to be arrayed in all the 
insignia of royalty. 



ARNOLD'S ROME. 



213 



■ But even the small share of power thus 
granted in theory to the commons, was in 
practice withheld from them. Whether from 
the influence of the patricians in the centuries, 
or by religious pretences urged by the augurs, 
or by the enormous and arbitrary power of 
refusing votes which the officer presiding at 
the comitia was wont to exercise, the college 
of the tribunes was for many years filled by 
the patricians alone. And, while the censor- 
ship was to be a fixed institution, the tribunes 
of the soldiers were to be replaced whenever 
it might appear needful by two consuls ; and 
to the consulship no plebeian was so much as 
legally eligible. Thus the victory of the aris- 
tocracy may seem to have been complete, and 
we may wonder how the commons, after 
having carried so triumphantly the law of 
Canuleius, should have allowed the political 
rights asserted for them by his colleagues, to 
have been so partially conceded in theory, and 
in practice to be so totally withheld. 

"The explanation is simple, and it is one 
of the most valuable lessons of history. The 
commons obtained those reforms which they 
desired, and they desired such only as their 
state was ripe for. They had withdrawn in 
times past to the Sacred Hill, but it was to 
escape from intolerable personal oppression ; 
they had recently occupied the Aventine in 
arms, but it was to get rid of a tyranny which 
endangered the honour of their wives and 
daughters, and to recover the protection of 
their tribunes ; they had more lately still re- 
tired to the Janiculum, but it was to remove 
an insulting distinction which embittered the 
relations of private life, and imposed on their 
grandchildren, in many instances, the incon- 
veniences, if not the reproach of illegitimacy. 
These were all objects of universal and per- 
sonal interest; and these the commons were 
resolved not to relinquish. But the possible 
admission of a few distinguished members of 
their body to the highest offices of state con- 
cerned the mass of the commons but little. 
They had their own tribunes for their personal 
protection ; but curule magistracies, and the 
government of the commonwealth, seemed to 
belong to the patricians, or at least might be 
left in their hands without any great sacrifice. 
So it is that all things come best in their 
season ; that political power is then most 
happily exercised by a people, when it has not 
been given to them prematurely, that is, before, 
in the natural progress of things, they feel the 
want of it. Security for person and property 
enables a nation to grow without interruption; 
in contending for this a people's sense of law 
and right is wholesomely exercised ; mean- 
time national prosperity increases, and brings 
with it an increase of intelligence, till other 
and more necessary wants being satisfied, men 
awaken to the highest earthly desire of the 
ripened mind, the desire of taking an active 
share in the great work of government. The 
Roman commons abandoned the highest ma- 
gistracies to the patricians for a period of many 
years ; but they continued to increase in pros- 
perity and in influence ; and what the fathers 
had wisely yielded, their sons in the fulness 
of time acquired. So the English House of 



Commons, in the reign of Edward III., declined 
to interfere in questions of peace and war, as 
being too high for them to compass; but they 
would not allow the crown to take their money 
without their own consent; and so the nation 
grew, and the influence of the House of Com- 
mons grew along with it, till that house has 
become the great and predominant power in 
the British constitution. 

"If this view be correct, Trebonius judged 
far more wisely than M. Duilius; and the 
abandonment of half the plebeian tribuneship 
to the patricians, in order to obtain for the 
plebeians an equal share in the higher magis- 
tracies, would have been as really injurious to 
the commons as it was unwelcome to the pride 
of the aristocracy. It was resigning a weapon 
with which they were familiar, for one which 
they knew not how to wield. The tribuneship 
was the foster-nurse of Roman liberty, and 
without its care that liberty never would 
have grown to maturity. What evils it after- 
wards wrought, when the public freedom was 
fully ripened, arose from that great defect of 
the Roman constitution, its conferring such 
extravagant powers on all its officers. It pro- 
posed to check one tyranny by another; in- 
stead of so limiting the prerogatives of every 
magistrate and order in the state, whether 
aristocratical or popular, as to exclude tyranny 
from all." 

Our limits will not admit of any other ex- 
tracts, how interesting soever they may be. 
Those already made will sufficiently indicate 
the character of the work. It is clear that Dr. 
Arnold, in addition to his well-known classical 
and critical acquirements, possesses a discri- 
minating judgment, a reflecting philosophic 
turn of mind, and the power of graphic inte- 
resting description. These are valuable quali- 
ties to any historian : they are indispensable 
to the annalist of Rome, and promise to render 
his work, if continued in the same spirit, the 
best history of that wonderful state in the 
English, perhaps in any modern, language. 
We congratulate him upon the auspicious 
commencement of his labours; we cordially 
wish him success, and shall follow him, with 
no ordinary interest, through the remainder 
of his vast subject, interesting to the student 
of ancient events, and the observer of contem- 
porary transactions. 

There are two points which we would 
earnestly recommend to the consideration of 
this learned author, as essential to the success 
of his work as a popular or durable history. 

The first is, to avoid, as much as possible, 
in the text, all discussions concerning qucstiones 
vexatas, or disputed points, and give the con- 
clusions at which he arrives in distinct propo- 
sitions, without any of the critical or antiquarian 
reasoning on which they are founded. These 
last, indeed, are of inestimable importance to 
the learned or the thoughtful. But how few 
are they, compared to the mass of readers ! 
and how incapable of giving to any historical 
work any extensive celebrity ! They should 
be given, but in notes, so as not, to ordinary 
readers, to interrupt the interest of the narra- 
tive, or break the continuity of thought. 

The second is, to exert himself to the utmost, 



214 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



and, on every occasion which presents itself, 
to paint, with graphic fire, the events, or peo- 
ple, or scenes which occur in the course of his 
narrative, and to give all the interest in his 
power to the description of battles, sieges, 
incidents, episodes, or speeches, which present 
themselves. More even than accuracy of de- 
tail, or any other more solid qualities, these 
fascinating graces determine, with future ages, 
the celebrity and permanent interest of an his- 
torical work. What is the charm which at- 
tracts all ages, and will do so to the end of the 
world, to the retreat of the Ten Thousand, the 
youth of Cyrus, the early annals of Rome, the 
Catiline conspiracy, the reign of Tiberius, the 
exploits of Alexander, the Latin conquest of 
Constantinople, the misfortunes of Mary, the 
death of Charles LI The eloquent fictions 
and graphic powers of Xenophon and Livy, 
of Sallust and Tacitus, of Quintus Curtius and 
Gibbon, of Robertson and Hume. In vain 
does criticism assail, and superior learning 
disprove, and subsequent discoveries overturn 
their enchanting narratives; in vain does the 
intellect of the learned few become skeptical 
as to the facts they relate, and which have 
sunk in the hearts of the many. The imagi- 
nation is kindled, the heart is overcome, and 
the works remain, not only immortal in cele- 
brity, but undecaying in influence through 
every succeeding age. Why should not his- 
tory, in modern as in ancient times, unite the 
interest of the romance to the accuracy of the 
annalist 1 Why should not real events en- 
chain the mind with the graces and the colours 
of poetry 1 That Dr. Arnold is learned, all 
who have studied his admirable edition of 
Thucydides know; that he can paint with 
force and interest, none who read the volume 
before us can doubt. Why, then, should not 
the latter qualities throw their brilliant hues 
over the accurate drawing of the former ] 

We have already said that we find no fault 
with Dr. Arnold on account of his politics ; 
nay, that we value his work the more, because, 
giving, as it promises to do, in the main, a 
faithful account of the facts of Roman history, 
it cannot fail to furnish, from a source the least 
suspicious, a host of facts decisive in favour 
of Conservative principles. By Conservative 
principles we do not mean attachment to 
despotic power, or aversion to genuine free- 
dom : on the contrary, we mean the utmost 
abhorrence of the former, and the strongest 



attachment to the latter. We mean an attach- 
ment to that form of government, and that 
balance of power, which alone can render 
these blessings permanent, — which render pro- 
perty the ruling, and numbers only the con- 
trolling power, — which give to weight of pos- 
session and intellect the direction of affairs, 
and intrust to the ardent feelings of the multi- 
tude the duty only of preventing their excesses, 
or exposing their corruption. Without the 
former, the rule of the people degenerates, in 
a few years, in every instance recorded in 
history, into licentious excess, and absolute 
tyranny; without the latter, the ambition or 
selfishness of the aristocracy perverts to their 
own private purposes the domain of the state. 
Paradoxical as it may appear.it is strictly and 
literally true, that the general inclination of 
abstract students, remote from a practical 
intercourse with mankind, to republican prin- 
ciples, is a decisive proof of the experienced 
necessity for Conservative policy that has 
always been felt in the actual administration 
of affairs. Recluse or speculative men become 
attached to liberal ideas, because they see them 
constantly put forth, in glowing and generous 
language, by the popular orators and writers 
in every age : they associate oppression with 
the government of a single ruler, or a compa- 
ratively small number of persons of great 
possessions, because they see, in general, that 
government is established on one or other of 
these bases; and, consequently, most of the 
oppressive acts recorded in history have ema- 
nated from such authority. They forget that 
the opportunity of abusing power has been so 
generally afforded to these classes by the ex- 
perienced impossibility of intrusting it to any 
other; that if the theory of popular govern- 
ment had been practicable, Democracy, instead 
of exhibiting only a few blood-stained specks 
in history, would have occupied the largest 
space in its annals ; that if the people had been 
really capable of directing affairs, they would, 
in every age, have been the supreme authority, 
and the holders of property the declaimers 
against their abuses; and that no proof can be 
so decisive against the practicability of any 
form of government, as the fact, that it has 
been found, during six thousand years, of such 
rare occurrence, as to make even learned 
persons, till taught by experience, blind to its 
tendency. 



MIRABEAU. 



215 



MIRABEAU/ 



" It is a melancholy fact," says Madame de 
Stael, " that while the human race is conti- 
nually advancing by the acquisitions of intel- 
lect, it is doomed to move perpetually in the 
same circle of error, from the influence of the 
passions." If this observation was just, even 
when this great author wrote, how much more 
is it now applicable, when a new generation 
has arisen, blind to the lessons of experience, 
and we in this free and prosperous land, have 
yielded to the same passions, and been seduced 
by the same delusions, which, three-aud-forty 
years ago, actuated the French people, and 
have been deemed inexcusable by all subse- 
quent historians, even in its enslaved popula- 
tion ! 

It would appear inconceivable, that the same 
errors should thus be repeated by successive 
nations, without the least regard to the les- 
sons of history; that all the dictates of expe- 
rience, all the conclusions of wisdom, all the 
penalties of weakness, should be forgotten, 
before the generation which has suffered under 
their neglect is cold in their graves; that the 
same vices should be repeated, the same crimi- 
nal ambition indulged, to the end of the world ; 
if we did not recollect that it is the very essence 
of passion, whether in nations or individuals, 
to be insensible to the sufferings of others, and 
to pursue its own headstrong inclinations, re- 
gardless alike of the admonitions of reason, 
and the experience of the world. It would 
seem that the vehemence of desire in nations 
is as little liable to be influenced by considera- 
tions of prudence, or the slightest regard to the 
consequences, as the career of intemperance in 
individuals ; and that, in like manner, as every 
successive age beholds multitudes who, in the 
pursuit of desire, rush headlong down the gulf 
of perdition, so every successive generation 
is doomed to witness the sacrifice of national 
prosperity, or the extinction of national exist- 
ence, in the insane pursuit of democratic am- 
bition. Providence has appointed certain 
trials for nations as well as individuals; and 
for those who, disregarding the admonitions 
of virtue, and slighting the dictates of duty, 
yield to the tempter, certain destruction is ap- 
pointed in the inevitable consequences of their 
criminal desires, not less in the government 
of empires, than the paths of private life. 

Forty years ago, the passion for innovation 
seized a great and powerful nation in Europe, 
illustrious in the paths of honour, grown gray 
in years of renown : the voice of religion was 
discarded, the lessons of experience rejected: 
visionary projects were entertained, chimeri- 
cal anticipations indulged: the ancient insti- 
tutions of the country were not amended, but 

* Souvenirs sur Mirabeau, et sur lea Premieres As- 
semblies Legislatives. Par Etienne Dammit, do Geneve. 
8vo. London: E. Bull. 1832.— We have translated Hie 
quotations ourselves, not having seen il"' English ver- 
sion. Blackwood's Magazine, May, ls3'2. Written 
when the Keform Bill was before the House of Peers. 



destroyed: a new constitution introduced 
amidst the unanimous applause of the peo- 
ple : the monarch placed himself at the head 
of the movement, the nobles joined the com- 
mons, the clergy united in the work of reform : 
all classes, by common consent, conspired in 
the demolition and reconstruction of the con- 
stitution. A new era was thought to have 
dawned on human affairs ; the age of gold to 
be about to return from the regeneration of 
mankind. 

The consequence, as all the world knows, 
was ruin, devastation, and misery, unparalleled 
in modern times : the king, the queen, the royal 
family were beheaded, the nobles exiled or 
guillotined, the clergy confiscated and banish- 
ed, the fundholders starved and ruined, the 
merchants exterminated, the landholders beg- 
gared, the people decimated. The wrath of 
Heaven needed no destroying angel to be the 
minister of its vengeance : the guilty passions 
of men jtvorked out their own and well-de- 
served punishment. The fierce passion of de- 
mocracy was extinguished in blood : the Reign 
of Terror froze every heart with horror: the 
tyranny of the Directory destroyed the very 
name of freedom : the ambition of Napoleon 
visited every cottage with mourning, and 
doomed to tears every mother in France; and 
the sycophancy of all classes, the natural re- 
sult of former license, so paved the way for 
military despotism, that the haughty emperor 
could only exclaim with Tiberius— " ho- 
mines ad servitutem parati !" 

Forty years after, the same unruly and reck- 
less spirit seized the very nation who had wit- 
nessed these horrors, and bravely struggled for 
twenty years to avert them from her own 
shores. The passion of democracy became 
general in all the manufacturing and trading 
classes : a large portion of the nobility were 
deluded by the infatuated idea, that by yield- 
ing to the torrent, they could regulate its di- 
rection : the ministers of the crown put them- 
selves at the head of the movement, and 
wielded the royal prerogative to give force 
and consistence to the ambition of the mul- 
titude : political fanaticism again reared its 
hydra head: the ministers of religion became 
the objects of odium ; every thing sacred, every 
thing venerable, the subject of opprobrium, 
and, by yielding to this tempest of passion, 
and terror, enlightened men seriously antici- 
pated, not a repetition of the horrors of the 
French Revolution, but the staying of the fury 
of democracy, the stilling of the waves of fac- 
tion, the calming the ambition of the people. 

That a delusion so extraordinary, a blind- 
ness so infatuated, should have existed so soou 
after the great and bloody drama had been 
acted on the theatre of Europe, will appear alto- 
gether incredible to future ages. It is certain, 
however, that it exists, not only among the 
unthinking millions, who, being incapable of 



216 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



judging of the consequences of political 
changes, are of no weight in a philosophical 
view of the subject, but among thinking thou- 
sands who are capable of forming a correct 
judgment, and whose opinions on other sub- 
jects are highly worthy of consideration. This 
is the circumstance which furnishes the real 
phenomenon, and into the causes of which fu- 
ture ages will anxiously inquire. It is no more 
surprising that a new generation of shop- 
keepers, manufacturers, and artisans, should 
be devoured by the passion for political 
power, without any regard to its recent con- 
sequences in the neighbouring kingdom, than 
that youth, in every successive generation, 
should yield to the seductions of pleasure, or 
the allurements of vice, without ever thinking 
of the miseries it has brought upon their fa- 
thers, and the old time before them. But how 
men of sense, talent, and informal ion ; men 
who really have a stake in the country, and 
would themselves be the first victims of revo- 
lution, should be carried away by the same in- 
fatuation, cannot be so easily explained ; and, 
if it cannot be accounted for from some acci- 
dental circumstances, offers the most gloomy 
prospects for the cause of truth, and the future 
destinies of mankind. 

"The direction of literature and philosophy 
in France, during the last half of the 18th 
century," says Madame de Stael, " was ex- 
tremely bad; but, if I may be allowed the ex- 
pression, the direction of ignorance has been 
still worse; for no one book can do much 
mischief to those who read all. If the idlers 
in the world, on the other hand, occupy them- 
selves by reading a few moments, the work 
which they read makes as great an impression 
on them as the arrival of a stranger in the 
desert; and if that work abounds in sophisms, 
they have no opposite arguments to oppose to 
it. The discovery of printing is truly fatal to 
those who read only by halves or chance : for know- 
ledge, like the Lance of Argail, inflicts wounds 
which nothing but itself can heal."* In this 
observation is to be found the true solution of 
the extraordinary political delusions which 
now overspread the world; and it is much 
easier to discern the causes of the calamity, 
than perceive what remedy can be devised for it. 

If you could give to all who can read the 
newspapers, either intellect to understand, or 
taste to relish, or money to buy, or time to read, 
works of historical information, or philoso- 
phical wisdom, there might be a reasonable 
hope that error in the end would be banished 
from thought, and that political knowledge, 
like the Thames water in the course of a long 
voyage, would work itself pure. But as it is 
obvious to every one practically acquainted 
with the condition of mankind, that ninety- 
nine out of the hundred who peruse the daily 
press, are either totally incapable of forming a 
sound opinion from their own reflections on 
any subject of thought, or so influenced by 
prejudice as to be inaccessible to the force of 
itason, or so much swayed by passion as to 
be deaf to argument, or so destitute of infor- 
mation as to be insensible to its force, it is 

* De l'Allemagne, iii. 247. 



hardly possible to discern any mode in which, 
with a daily press extensively read, and poli- 
tical excitement kept up, as it always will be 
by its authors, either truth is to become gene- 
rally known, or error sufficiently combated. 
Every one, how slender soever his intellect, 
how slight his information, how limited his 
time for study, can understand and feel gra- 
tified by abuse of his superiors. The com- 
mon slang declamation against the aristocrats, 
the clergy, and the throne, in France, and 
against the boroughmongers, the bishops, and 
the peers, in England, is on the level of the 
meanest capacity ; and is calculated to seduce 
all those who are "either," in Bacon's words, 
"weak in judgment, or infirm in resolution; 
that is, the greater proportion of mankind." 

It is this circumstance of the universal dif- 
fusion of passion, and the extremely limited 
extent of such intellect or information as 
qualifies to judge on political subjects, which 
renders the future prospects of any nation, 
which has got itself involved in the whirlwind 
of innovation, so extremely melancholy. Every 
change which is proposed holds out some im- 
mediate or apparent benefit, which forms the 
attraction and inducement to the multitude. 
Every one can see and understand this imme- 
diate or imaginary benefit; and therefore the 
change is clamorously demanded by the people. 
To discern the ultimate effects again, to see how 
these changes are to operate on the frame of so- 
ciety, and the misery they are calculated to bring 
on the very persons who demand them, requires 
a head of more than ordinary strength,and know- 
ledge of more than ordinary extent. Nature has 
not given the one, education can never give 
the other, to above one in a hundred. Hence 
the poison circulates universally, while the 
antidote is confined to a few; and therefore, 
in such periods, the most extravagant mea- 
sures are forced upon government, and a total 
disregard of experience characterizes the na- 
tional councils. 

It is to this cause that the extremely short 
duration of any institutions, which have been 
framed under the pressure of democratic in- 
fluence, is to be ascribed, and the rapidity with 
which they are terminated by the tranquil des- 
potism of the sword. Rome, in two generations, 
ran through the horrors of democratic convul- 
sions, until they were stopped by the sword of 
the Dictator. France, since the reform trans- 
ports of 1789 began, has had thirteen different 
constitutions; none of which subsisted two 
years, except such as were supported by the 
power of Napoleon and the bayonets of the 
allies. England, in five years after the people 
ran mad in 1G42, was quietly sheltered under 
thedespotism of Cromwell; andtheconvulsions 
of the republics of South America have been 
so numerous since their struggles began, that 
civilized nations have ceased to count them. 

Historians recording events at a distance 
from the period of their occurrence, and ig- 
norant of the experienced evils which led to 
their adoption, have often indulged in eloquent 
declamation against the corruption and debase- 
ment of those nations, such as Florence, Milan, 
Sienna, and Denmark, which have by common 
consent, and a solemn act, surrendered their 



MIR ABE AU. 



217 



liberties to a sovereign prince. There is no- 
thing, however, either extraordinary or de- 
basing about it; they surrendered their privi- 
leges, because they had never known what 
real freedom was ; they invoked the tranquillity 
of despotism, to avoid the experienced ills of 
anarchy; they chose the lesser, to avoid the 
greater evil. Democracy, admirable as a 
spring, and when duly tempered by the other 
elements of society, is utterly destructive 
where it becomes predominant, or is deprived 
of its regulating weight. The evils it pro- 
duces are so excessive, the suffering it occa- 
sions so dreadful, that society cannot exist 
under them, and the people take refuge in 
despair, in the surrender of all they have 
been contending for, to obtain that peace 
which they have sought for in vain amidst 
its stormy convulsions. The horrors of de- 
mocratic tyranny greatly exceed those either 
of regal or aristocratic oppression. History 
contains numerous examples of nations, who 
have lingered on for centuries, under the 
bowstring of the sultan, or the fetters of the 
feudal nobility ; but none in which democratic 
violence, when once fairly let loose, has not 
speedily brought about its own extirpation. 

But although there is little hope that the 
multitude, when once infected by the deadly 
contagion of democracy, can right themselves, 
or be righted by others, by the utmost efforts 
of reason, argument, or eloquence, nature has 
in reserve one remedy of sovereign and uni- 
versal efficacy, which is as universally under- 
stood, and as quick in its operation, as the 
poison which rendered its application neces- 
sary. This Remedy is Suffering. Every 
man cannot, indeed, understand political rea- 
soning; but every man can feel the want of 
a meal. The multitude may be insensible to 
the efforts of reason and eloquence ; but the}' 
cannot remain deaf to the dangers of murder 
and conflagration. These, the natural and 
unvarying attendants on democratic ascend- 
ency, will as certainly in the end tame the 
fierce spirits of the people, as winter will suc- 
ceed summer; but whether they will do so in 
time to preserve the national freedom, or up- 
hold the national fortunes, is a very different, 
and far more doubtful question. It is seldom 
that the illumination of suffering comes in 
time to save the people from the despotism of 
the sword. 

It is in this particular that the superior 
strength and efficiency of free constitutions, 
such as Britain, in resisting the fatal encroach- 
ments of democracy, to any possessed by a 
despotic government, is to be found. The 
habits of union, intelligence, and political ex- 
ertion, which they have developed, have given 
to the higher and more influential classes such 
a power of combining to resist the danger, that 
obstacles are thrown in the way of change, 
which retard the fatal rapidity of its course. 
Discussion goes on in the legislature ; talent is 
enlisted on the side of truth ; honour and 
patriotism are found in the post of danger ; 
virtue receives its noblest attribute in the 
universal calumnies of wickedness. These 
generous efforts, indeed, are totally unavailing 
to alter the opinion of the many-headed mon- 
28 



ster which has started into political activity; 
but they combine the brave, the enlightened, 
and the good, into a united phalanx, which, 
if it cannot singly resist the torrent, may, at 
least, arrest its fury, till the powers of nature 
come to its aid. These powers do come at last 
with desperate and resistless effect, in the uni- 
versal suffering, the far-spread agony, the hope- 
loss depression of the poor; but the danger 
is imminent, that before the change takes place 
the work of destruction may be completed, and 
the national liberties, deprived of the ark of the 
constitution, be doomed to perish under the 
futile attempts to reconstruct it. 

There never was a mistake so deplorable, 
as to imagine that it is possible, to give to any 
nation at once a new constitution; or to pre- 
serve the slightest guarantee for freedom, 
under institutions created at once by the 
utmost efforts of human wisdom. It is as im- 
possible at once to give a durable constitution 
to a nation as it is to give a healthful frame 
to an individual, without going through the 
previous changes of childhood and youth. 
" Governments," says Sir James Mackintosh, 
" are not framed after a model, but all their 
parts grow out of occasional acts, prompted 
by some urgent expedience, or some private 
interest, which in the course of time coalesce 
and harden into usage ; and this bundle of 
usages is the object of respect, and the guide 
of conduct, long before it is im bodied, defined, 
or enforced in written laws. Government 
may be, in some degree, reduced to system, 
but it cannot flow from it. It is not like a 
machine, or a building, which may be con- 
structed entirely, and according to a previous 
plan, by the art and labour of man. It is 
better illustrated by comparison with vege- 
tables, or even animals, which may be, in a 
very high degree, improved by skill and care 
— which may be grievously injured by neglect, 
or destroyed by violence, but which cannot 1 e 
produced by human contrivance. A govern- 
ment can, indeed, be no more than a mere 
draught or scheme of rule, when it is not com- 
posed of habits of obedience on the part of 
the people, and of an habitual exercise of cer- 
tain portions of authority by the individuals or 
bodies who constitute the sovereign power. 
These habits, like all others, can only be 
formed by repeated acts ; they cannot be sud- 
denly infused by the lawgiver, nor can they 
immediately follow the most perfect convic- 
tion of their propriety. Many causes having 
more power over the human mind than writ- 
ten law, it is extremely difficult, from the mere 
perusal of a written scheme of government, to 
foretell what it will prove in action. There 
may be governments so bad that it is justifi- 
able to destroy them, and to trust to the proba- 
bility that a better government will grow in 
their stead. But as the rise of a worse is also 
possible, so terrible a peril is never to be incurred 
except in the case of tyranny which it is impossible to 
reform. It may be necessary to burn a forest 
containing much useful timber, but giving 
shelter to beasts of prey, who are formidable 
to an infant colony in its neighbourhood, and 
of too vast an extent to be gradually and safely 
thinned by their inadequate labour. It is fit. 



218 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



however, that they should be apprized, before 
they take an irreparable step, how little it is 
possible to foresee, whether the earth, stripped 
of its vegetation, shall become an unprofitable 
desert or a pestilential marsh."* 

The great cause, therefore, of the devastat- 
ing march of revolutions, and the total sub- 
version which they in general effect in the 
liberties of the people, is the fundamental 
changes in laws and institutions which they 
effect. As long as these remain untouched, 
or not altered in any considerable degree, any 
passing despotism, how grievous soever, is 
only of temporary effect ; and when the tyran- 
ny is overpast, the public freedom again runs 
into its wonted and consuetudinary channels. 
Thus the successive tyrannies of Richard the 
Third, Henry the Eighth, and James the Se- 
cond, produced no fatal effects on English 
freedom, because they subsisted only during 
the lifetime of an arbitrary or capricious sove- 
reign ; and, upon his death, the ancient privi- 
leges of the people revived, and the liberties 
of the nation again were as extensive as ever. 
The great rebellion hardly partook at all, at 
least in its early stages, of a democratic move- 
ment. Its leaders were the House of Com- 
mons, who possessed four-fifths of the landed 
property of the kingdom, and were proprietors 
of three times as much territory as the Upper 
House; hence no considerable changes in laws, 
institutions, or customs, took place. " The 
courts of law," says Lingard, "still adminis- 
tered law on the old precedents, and, with the 
exception of a change of the dynasty on the 
throne, the people perceived little change in 
the administration of government."! Power 
was not, during the course of the Revolution, 
transferred into other and inferior hands, from 
whence it never can be wrenched but at the 
sword's point; it remained in the House of 
Commons, the legal representatives of the 
kingdom, till it was taken from them by the 
hand of Cromwell. The true democratic spi- 
rit appeared at the close of the struggles in the 
Fifth Monarchy men, but their numbers were 
too inconsiderable to acquire any preponder- 
ance before the usurpation of the daring Pro- 
tector. Accordingly, on the Restoration, the 
first thing that government did, was to issue 
writs for all persons to return members to 
Parliament who were qualified prior to 1640; 
and after an abeyance of twenty years, the 
blood of the constitution was again poured 
into its ancient veins. The Revolution of 
1688, as it is called, was not strictly speaking 
a revolution; it was merely a change of dy- 
nasty, accompanied by a unanimous effort 
of the public will, and unattended by the least 
change in the aristocratic influence, or the ba- 
lance of powers in the state. 

The wisdom of our ancestors is a foolish 
phrase, which does not convey the meaning 
which it is intended to express. When it is 
said that institutions formed by the wisdom of 
former ages should not be changed, it is not 
meant that our ancestors were gifted with any 
extraordinary sagacity, or were in any respect 



* Mackintosh's History of England i 73 
t Lingard, xi. 11, 12. 



! superior to what we are — what is meant is, 
that the customs which they adopted were the 
result of experienced utility and known neces- 
sity; and that the collection of usages, called 
the constitution, is more perfect than any hu- 
man wisdom could at once have framed, be- 
cause it has arisen out of social wants, and 
been adapted to the exigencies of actual prac- 
tice, during a long course of ages. To demo- 
lish and reconstruct such a constitution, to 
remove power from the hands in which it was 
formerly vested, and throw it into channels 
where it never was accustomed to flow, is 
an evil incomparably greater, an experiment 
infinitely more hazardous, than the total sub- 
version of the liberties of the people by an 
ambitious monarch or a military usurper, be- 
cause it not only destroys the balance of power 
at the moment, but renders it impossible for 
the nation to right itself at the close of the ty- 
ranny, and raises up a host of separate revo- 
lutionary interests, vested at the moment with 
supreme authority, and dependent for their ex- 
istence upon the continuance of the revolu- 
tionary regime. It is to government what a 
total change of landed property is to the body 
politic ; a wound which, as Ireland sufficiently 
proves, a nation can never recover. 

As the Reform Bill proposes to throw a 
large part of the political power in the state 
into new and inexperienced hands, the change 
thereby contemplated is incomparably greater 
and more perilous than the most complete 
prostration of the liberties, either of the people 
or the aristocracy, by a passing tyranny. It is 
the creation of new and formidable revolu- 
tionary interests which will never expire; the 
vesting of power in hands jealous of its pos- 
session, in proportion to the novelty of its 
acquisition, and their own unfitness to wield 
it, which is the insuperable evil. Such a ca- 
lamity is inflicted as effectually by the tranquil 
and pacific formation of a new constitution, 
as by the most terrible civil wars, or the se- 
verest military oppression. The liberties of 
England survived the wars of the Roses, the 
fury of the Covenant, and the tyranny of 
Henry VIII. ; but those of France were at 
once destroyed by the insane innovations of 
the Constituent Assembly. And this destruc- 
tion took place without any bloodshed or op- 
position, under the auspices of a reforming 
king, a conceding nobility, and an intoxicated 
people, by the mere unresisted votes of the 
States-General. 

The example of France is so extremely and 
exactly applicable to our changes— the pacific 
and applauded march of its innovations was 
so precisely similar to that which has so long 
been pressed upon the legislature in this coun- 
try, that it is not surprising that it should be 
an extremely sore subject with the Reformers- 
and that they should endeavour, by every me, 
thod of ingenuity, misrepresentation, and con- 
cealment, to withdraw the public attention 
from so damning a precedent. It is fortunate, 
therefore, for the cause of truth, that at this 
juncture a work has appeared, flowing from 
the least suspicious quarter, which at once 
puts this matter on the right footing, and de- 
monstrates that it was not undue delay, but 



MIRABEAU. 



219 



over rapidity of concession, which brought 
about the unexampled horrois of its Revolu- 
tion. 

M. Dumont, whose "Souvenirs sur Mira- 
beau" is prefixed to this article, was the early 
and faithful friend of that extraordinary man. 
He wrote a great proportion of his speeches, 
and composed almost entirely the Courier de 
Provence, a journal published in the name of 
Mirabeau, and to which a great part of his 
political celebrity was owing. The celebrated 
declaration on the Rights of Man, published 
by the Constituent Assembly, was almost en- 
tirely composed by him. He was the intimate 
friend of Brissot, Garat, Roland, Vergniaud, 
Talleyrand, and all the leaders of the popular 
party, and his opinion was deemed of so much 
importance, that he was frequently consulted 
by the ministers as to the choice of persons to 
fill the highest situations. In this country he 
was the intimate and valued friend of Sir 
Samuel Romilly, Mr. Whitbread, Lord Lans- 
downe, Lord Holland, and all the party at 
Holland House. Latterly, he was chiefly oc- 
cupied in arranging, composing, and putting 
into order the multifarious effusions of Mr. 
Bentham's genius ; and from his pen almost 
all the productions of that great and original 
man have flowed. Half the fame of Mirabeau, 
and more than half that of Bentham, rest on 
his labours. He was no common person who 
was selected to be the coadjutor of two such 
men, and rendered the vehicle of communicat- 
ing their varied and original thoughts to the 
world. 

Before quoting the highly interesting ob- 
servations of this able and impartial observer 
on the French Constituent Assembly, and 
comparing them with the progress of Reform 
m this country, we shall recall to our readers' 
recollection the dates of the leading measures 
of that celebrated body, as, without having 
them in view, the importance of M. Dumont's 
observations cannot be duly appreciated. Such 
a survey will at the same time bring to the 
test the accuracy of Mr. Macaulay's and Sir 
John Hobhouse's assertion, that it was not the 
concession, but the resistance, of the privi- 
leged orders, which precipitated the fatal ca- 
taract of their Revolution. The abstract is 
abridged from Mignet, the ablest historian on 
the republican side of which France can 
boast, and Lacretelle, the well known annal- 
ist of its events. 

In August, 1788, Louis, in obedience to the 
wishes of the nation, agreed to assemble the 
States-General, which had not met in Fiance 
since 1614. 

In September, 1789, the king, by the advice 
of Neckar, by a royal ordinance, doubled the 
number of the representatives of the Tiers 
Etat; in other words, he doubled the House 
of Commons of France,* while those of the 
clergy and nobles were left at their former 
amount. 

The elections in April, 1789, were conduct- 
ed with the utmost favour to the popular par- 
ty. No scrutiny of those entitled to vote took 
place; after the few first days, every person 



* Mignet, i. 25. 



decently dressed was allowed to vote, without 
asking any questions.* 

When the States-General met in May 6, 
1789, the king and his minister, Neckar, were 
received with cold and dignified courtesy by 
the nobles and clergy, but rapturous applause 
by the Tiers Etat, who saw in them the au- 
thors of the prodigious addition which the 
number and consequence of their order had 
received.f 

May 9. No sooner had the States-General 
proceeded to business, than the Tiers Etat de- 
manded that the nobles and clergy should sit 
dm! ro'c with them in one chamber ; a proceeding 
unexampled in French history, and which it 
was foreseen would give them the complete 
ascendency, by reason of their numerical su- 
periority to those of both the other orders 
united.^ 

May 10 to June 9. The nobles and clergy 
resisted for a short while this prodigious inno- 
vation, and insisted that, after the manner of 
all the States-General which had assembled in 
France from the foundation of the monarchy, 
the orders should sit and vote by separate 
chambers ; and that this was more especially 
indispensable since the recent duplication of 
the Tiers Etat had given that body a numeri- 
cal superiority over the two other orders taken 
together.§ 

June 17. The Tiers Etat declared themselves 
the National Assembly of France, a designa- 
tion, says Dumont, which indicated their in- 
tention to usurp the whole sovereignty of "the 
state." 

June 21. The king, terrified at the thoughts 
of a collision with the Commons, and thinking 
to put himself at the head of the movement, 
first persuaded, and at length, through the 
medium of Marshal Luxembourg, commanded 
the nobles to yield to this demand of the Tiers 
Etat.l 

The nobles and clergy gradually yielded. 
On the 19th June, 1789, one hundred and forty- 
seven of the clergy joined the Tiers Etat, and 
on the 25th, the Duke of Orleans, with forty- 
seven of the nobles, also deserted their order, 
and adhered to the opposite party. The re- 
mainder finding their numbers so seriously 
weakened, and urged on by their Reforming 
Sovereign, also joined the Tiers Etat, and sat 
with them in one assembly on 27th June4 
"On that day (says Dumont) the Revolution 
was completed." 

On the 23d June, 17S9, the king held a 
solemn meeting of the whole estates in one 
assembly, and while he declared the former 
proceedings of the Tiers Etat unconstitutional, 
granted such immense concessions to the peo- 
ple, as never, says Mirabeau, were before 
granted by a king to his subjects. All the 
objects of the Revolution, says Mignet, were 
gained by that royal ordinance.** 

July 13. The king ordered the troops, who 
had been assembled in the vicinity of the ca- 
pital, to be withdrawn, and sanctioned the es- 
tablishment of National Guards.ff 



* Dumont. t Mignet, i. 30. t Mignet, i. 3T. 

t Mignet, i. 37. |] Lacretelle, Pr.Hist. p. 3. 
IT Lacretelle, Pr. Hist. i. 42. ** Ibid. i. 43. 

tt Ibid. i. 3. 



220 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Jul} r 14. The Uastile taken, and all Paris in 
an insurrection. 

July 16. The king appointed Lafayette com- 
mander of the National Guard, and Bailly, the 
president of the Assembly, mayor of Paris. 

July 17. The king visited Paris in the midst 
of a mob of 200,000 revolutionary democrats. 

Aug. 4. The whole feudal rights, including 
tithes, abandoned in one night by the nobility, 
on the motion of the Duke de Noailles. 

Aug. 13. Decree of the Assembly declaring 
all ecclesiastical estates national property. 

Aug. 20. The Declaration of the Rights of 
Man issued. 

Aug. 23. Freedom of religious opinions pro- 
claimed. 

Aug. 24. The unlimited freedom of the press 
established. 

Aug. 25. Dreadful disturbances in Paris on 
account of famine. 

Sept. 13. A new decree on account of the 
extreme suffering at Paris. 

Oct. 5. Versailles invaded by a clamorous 
mob. The king and queen nearly murdered, 
and brought captives by a furious mob to Pa- 
ris. 

Nov. 2. Decree passed, on the motion of the 
Bishop of Autun, for the confiscation and dis- 
posal of all ecclesiastical property. 

Feb. 24, 1790. Titles of honour abolished. 

Feb. 26. New division of the kingdom into 
departments ; and all appointments, civil and 
military, vested in the people. 

March 17. Sale of 400 millions of the na- 
tional domains authorized, and assignats, bear- 
ing a forced circulation, issued, to supply the 
immense deficiency of the revenue.* 

It is unnecessary to go farther. Here it ap- 
pears, that within two months of the meeting of 
the States-General, the union of the orders in 
one chamber, in other words, the annihilation 
of the House of Peers, was effected, the feudal 
rights abolished, and the entire sovereignty 
vested in the National Assembly. In three 
months, the church property was confiscated, 
the Rights of Man published, titles annihilated, 
and the unlimited freedom of the press pro- 
claimed. In five months, the king and royal 
family were brought prisoners to Paris. In 
six months, the distress naturally consequent on 
these convulsions had attracted the constant 
attention of the Assembly, and spread the ut- 
most misery among the people ; and in ten 
months, the total failure of the revenue had 
rendered the sale of church property, and ihe 
issuing of assignats bearing a forced circula- 
tion, necessary, which it is well known soon 
swallowed up property of every description 
throughout France. We do not know what 
the reformers consider as tardy concessions 
of the nobility and throne; but when it is re- 
collected that all these proceedings were agreed 
to by the king, and passed by the legislature at 
the dates here specified, it is conceived that a 
more rapid revolutionary progress could hard- 
ly be wished for by the most ardent reformer. 

The authority of Madame de Stae'l was ap- 
pealed to in' the House of Commons, as illus- 
trative of the TSJl attempts of a portion of the 

* See Lacretelle, Pr. Hist. p. 1—9, Introduction. 



aristocracy to stem the torrent. Let us hear 
the opinion of the same great writer, as to 
who it was that put it in motion. " No revolu- 
tion," she observes, "can succeed in a great 
country, unless it is commenced by the aristocratical 
class. The people afterwards get possession 
of it, but they cannot strike the first blow. 
When I recollect that it was the parliaments, the 
nobles, and the clergy of France, who first strove 
to limit the royal authority, I am far from in- 
sinuating that their design in so doing was 
culpable. A sincere enthusiasm then ani- 
mated all ranks of Frenchmen — public spirit 
had spread universally ; and among the higher 
classes, the most enlightened and generous 
were those who ardently desired that public 
opinion should have its due sway in the direc- 
tion of affairs. But can the privileged ranks, who 
commenced, the Revolution, accuse those who only 
carried it on 1 Some will say, we wished only 
that the changes should proceed a certain 
length; others, that they should go a step far- 
ther; but who can regidatc the impulse of a great 
people when once put in motion/"* These are 
the words of sober wisdom, and coming, as 
they do, from the gifted daughter of M. Neckar, 
who had so large a share, by the duplication 
of the Tiers Etat, in the raising of the tempest, 
and who was so devoted a worshipper of her 
father's memory, none were ever uttered worthy 
of more profound meditation. 

This is the true principle on the subject. 
The aid of the Crown, or of a portion of the 
aristocracy, is indispensable to put the torrent 
of democracy in motion. After it is fairly set 
agoing, all their efforts are unavailing to re- 
strain its course. This is what we have all 
along maintained. Unless the French nobility 
had headed the mob in demanding the States- 
General, matters could never have been brought 
to a crisis. After they had roused the public 
feeling, they found, by dear-bought experience, 
that they were altogether unable to restrain its 
fury. In this country, the revolutionary party 
could have done nothing, had they not been 
supported in their projects of reform by the 
ministers of the Crown and the Whig nobility. 
Having been so, we shall see whether they will 
be better able than their compeers on the other 
side of the Channel to master the tempest they 
have raised. 

It has been already stated, that a large por- 
tion of the nobility supported the pretensions 
of the Tiers Etat. Dumont gives the following 
picture of the reforming nobles, and of the ex- 
travagant expectations of the different classes 
who supported their favourite innovations: 

"The house of the Duke de Rochefoucauld, 
distinguished by its simplicity, the purity of its 
manners, and the independence of its princi- 
ples, assembled all those members of the no- 
bility who supported the people, the double re- 
presentation of the Tiers Etat, the vote per ca- 
pita, the abandonment of all privileges, and the 
like. Condorcet, Dupont, Lafayette, the Duke 
de Liancourt, were the chief persons of that 
society. Their ruling passion toas to create for 
France a new constitution. Such of the nobility 
and princes as wished to preserve the ancient 



* Revolution Frangaise, i. 125. 



MIRABEAU. 



221 



constitution of the Stales-General, formed the aris- 
tocratic party, against which the public in- 
dignation was so general; but although much 
noise was made about them, their numbers 
were inconsiderable. The bulk of the nation 
saw only in the States-General the means of di- 
minishing the taxes; the fundholders, so often 
exposed to the consequences of a violation of 
public faith, considered them as an invincible 
rampart against national bankruptcy. The defi- 
cit had made them tremble. They were on the 
point of ruin ; and they embraced with warmth 
the hope of giving to the revenues of the state 
a secure foundation. These ideas were utterly 
inconsistent with each other. The nobility had 
in their bosom a democratic as well as an aristo- 
cratic party. The clergy were divided in the same 
manner, and so were the commons. No words 
can convey an idea of the confusion of ideas, 
the extravagant expectations, the hopes and 
passions of all parties. You would imagine 
the world was on the day after the creation." — 
Pp. 37, 38. 

We have seen that the clergy, by their join- 
ing the Tiers Etat, first gave them a decided 
superiority over the other orders, and vested 
in their hands omnipotent power, by compel- 
ling the nobles to sit and vote with them in an 
assembly where they were numerically infe- 
rior to the popular party. The return they 
met with in a few months was, a decree confis- 
cating all their property to the service of the 
state. With bitter and unavailing anguish did 
they then look back to their insane conduct in 
so strongly fanning a flame of which they were 
soon to be the victims. Dumont gives the fol- 
lowing striking account of the feelings of one 
of their reforming bishops, when the tempest 
they had raised reached their own doors. 

"The Bishop of Chartres was one of the bi- 
shops who were attached to the popular parly ; 
that is to say, he was a supporter of the union 
of the orders, of the vote by head, and the new 
constitution. He was by no means a man of 
a political turn, nor of any depth of understand- 
ing; but he had so much candour and good 
faith that he distrusted no one; he never ima- 
gined that the Tiers Etat could have any other 
design but to reform the existing abuses, and 
do the good which appeared so easy a matter 
to all the world. A stranger to every species 
of intrigue, sincere in his intentions, he fol- 
lowed no other guide than his conscience, and 
what he sincerely believed to be for the public 
good. His religion was like his politics; he 
was benevolent, tolerant, and sincerely re- 
joiced to see the Protestants exempted from 
every species of constraint. He was well 
aware that the clergy would be called on to 
make great sacrifices; but never anticipated 
that he was destined to be the victim of the Re- 
volution. I saw him at the time when the 
whole goods of the church were declared na- 
tional property, with tears in his eyes, dismiss- 
ing his old domestics, reducing his hospitable 
mansion, selling his most precious effects to 
discharge his debts. He found some relief by 
pouring his sorrow into my bosom. His re- 
grets were not for himself, but he incessantly 
accused himself for having suffered himself to 
be deceived, and embraced the party of the 



Tiers Etat, which violated, when triumphant, 
all the engagements which it had made when 
in a state of weakness. How grievous it must 
have been to a man of good principles to have 
contributed to the success of so unjust a party ! 
Yet never man had less reason, morally speak- 
ing, to reproach himself." — Pp. 66, 67. 

This spoliation of the clergy has already 
commenced in this country, even before the 
great democratic measure of Reform is carried. 
As usual also, the supporters of the popular 
party are likely to be its first victims. We all 
recollect the decided part which Lord Milton 
took in supporting the Reform Bill, and the 
long and obstinate conflict he maintained with 
Mr. Cartwright, and the Conservative party in 
Northamptonshire, at the last election. Well, 
he gained his point, and he is now beginning 
to taste its fruits. Let us hear the proclama- 
tion which he has lately placarded over all his 
extensive estates in the county of Wicklow — 
"Grosvcnor Place, March 10. 

"I was in hopes that the inhabitants of our 
part of the country had too deep sense of the 
importance of respecting the rights of property, 
and of obeying the laws, to permit them to con- 
template what I can call by no other name 
than a scheme of spoliation and robbery. It seems 
that the occupier proposes to withhold payment 
of tithe, &c. ; but let me ask, what is it that en- 
titles the occupier himself to the land which he 
occupies ? Is it not the law which sanctions 
the lease by which he holds it 1 The law gives 
him a right to the cattle which he rears on his 
land, to the plough with which he cultivates it, 
and to the car in which he carries his produce 
to the market; the law also gives him his right 
to nine-tenths of the produce of his land, but 
the same law assigns the other tenth to another 
person. In this distribution of the produce of 
the land, there is no injustice, because the te- 
nant was perfectly aware of it when he entered 
upon his land; but in any forcible change of 
this distribution there would be great injustice, 
because it would be a transfer of proper! y from one 
person to another without an equivalent — in other 
words, it would be a robbery. The occupier must 
also remember that the rent he pays to the 
landlord is calculated upon the principle of his 
receiving only nine-tenths of the produce — if 
he were entitled to the other tenth, the rent 
which we should call upon him to pay would 
be proportionably higher. All our land is va- 
lued to the tenants upon this principle; but if 
tithes, &c, are swept away without an equiva- 
lent, we shall adopt a different principle, and 
the landlord, not the tenant, will be the gainer. 

Miltox." 

There can be no doubt that the principles 
here laid down by Lord Milton are well found- 
ed ; but did it never occur to his lordship that 
they are somewhat inconsistent with those of 
the Reform Bill ! If the principle be correct, 
" that the transfer of property from one person 
to another without an equivalent is robbery," 
what are we say of the disfranchising the 
electors of 148 seats in Parliament, and the 
destruction of property worth 2,500,000/., vest- 
ed before the Reform tempest began, in the 
Scotch freeholders 1 Lords Eldon and Tenter- 
den, it is to be recollected, have declared tha*. 
t2 



222 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



these rights "are a property as well as a trust."* 
They stand, therefore, on the same foundation 
as Lord Fitzwilliam's right to his Irish tithes. 
No more injustice is done by confiscating the 
one than the other. But this is just an in- 
stance how clear-sighted men are to the "rob- 
bery" of revolutionary measures when they 
approach their own door, and how extremely 
blind when it touches upon the freeholds of 
others. Lord Milton was a keen supporter of 
schedule A, and disregarded the exclamations 
against " robbery and spoliation," which were 
so loudly made by the able and intrepid Con- 
servative band in the House of Commons. 
Did his lordship ever imagine that the system 
of spoliation was to stop short at the freehold 
corporations, or the boroughs of Tory Peers ? 
He will learn to his cost that the radicals can 
find as good plunder in the estates of the Whig 
as the Conservative nobility. But when the 
day of reckoning comes, he cannot plead the 
excuse of the honest and benevolent Bishop of 
Charlies. He was well forewarned of the con- 
sequences ; the example of France was before 
his eyes, and it was clearly pointed out to his 
attention; but he obstinately rushed forward in 
the insane career of innovation, which, almost 
under his own eyes, had swallowed up all the 
reforming nobility and clergy of that unhappy 
kingdom. 

The vast importance of words in revolution- 
ary convulsions, of which Napoleon was so 
well aware when he said that "it was by epi- 
thets that you govern mankind," appears in the 
account given by this able and impartial writer 
on the designation which the Tiers Etat chose 
for themselves before their union with the 
other orders. 

"The people of Versailles openly insulted 
in the streets and at the gates of the Assembly 
those whom they called Aristocrats. The power 
of that word became magical, as is always the 
case with party epithets. What astonishes me 
is, that there was no contrary denomination 
fixed on by the opposite party. They were 
called the Nation. The effects of these two 
words, when constantly opposed to each other, 
may readily be conceived. 

"Though the Commons had already become 
sensible of their power, there were many opi- 
nions on the way in which it should be exerted, 
and the name to be given to the Assembly. 
They had not as yet all the audacity which 
they have since evinced; but the men who 
looked into futurity clearly saw that this de- 
termination would have been of the most im- 
portant consequences. To declare themselves 
the National Assembly was to count for nothing 
the king, the noblesse, and the clergy; it was 
equivalent to a declaration of civil war, if the 
government had had sufficient vigour to make 
any resistance. To declare themselves the 
Assembly of the Commons, was to express 
what undoubtedly was the fact, but what would 
not have answered the purpose of compelling 
the clergy and nobles to join them. Many de- 
nominations were proposed which were neither 
the one nor the other of these ; for every one as 
yet was desirous to conceal his ultimate pre- 

*In debate on Reform Bill, Oct. S, 1831. 



tensions; and even Sieyes, who rejected every 
thing which tended to preserve the distinction 
of orders, did not venture to table the expres- 
sion, National Assembly. It was hazarded for 
the first time by a deputy named Le Grand; 
there was an immediate call for the vote, and 
it was carried by a majority of 500 to 80 
voices."— Pp. 73, 74. 

This is the never-failing device of the demo- 
cratic party in all ages. Trusting to the ma- 
jority of mere numbers on their side, they 
invariably represent themselves as the whole 
nation, and the friends of the constitution as a 
mere fragment, utterly unworthy of consider- 
ation or regard. " Who are the Tiers Etat?" 
said the Abbe Sieyes. "They are the French 
nation, minus 150,000 privileged individuals." — 
" Who are the Reformers V says the Times. 
" They are 24,000,000 of men, minus 200 bo- 
roughmongers." By such false sweeping as- 
sertions as these, are men's eyes blinded not 
only to what is honourable, but to what is safe 
and practicable. By this single device of call- 
ing the usurping Commons the National As- 
sembly, the friends of order were deterred from 
entering into a struggle with what was called, 
and therefore esteemed, the national will; and 
many opportunities of stemming the torrent, 
which, as Dumont shows, afterwards arose, 
irrecoverably neglected. 

Of the fatal weakness which attended the 
famous sitting of the 23d June, 1789, when 
Louis made such prodigious concessions to 
his subjects, without taking at the same time 
any steps to make the royal authority respected, 
the opinion of Dumont is as follows : — 

" Neckar had intended by these concessions 
to pu> democracy into the royal hands ; but they had 
the effect of putting the oris ocracy under the des- 
potism of the people. We must not consider that 
royal sitting in itself alone. Viewed in this 
light, it contained the most extensive concessions 
that ever monarch made to his people. They would, 
at any other time, have excited the most lively 
gratitude. Is a prince powerful ? Every thing 
that he gives is a gift, every thing that he does 
not resume is a favour. Is he weak 1 ? every 
thing that he concedes is considered as a debt; 
every thing that he refuses, as an act of in- 
justice. 

" The Commons had now set their heart 
upon being the National Assembly. Every 
thing which did not amount to that was nothing 
in their estimation. But to hold a Bed of Jus- 
tice, annul the decrees of the Commons, make 
a great noise without having even foreseen any 
resistance, or taken a single precaution for the 
morrow, without having taken any steps to 
prepare a party in the Assembly, was an act 
of madness, and from it may be dated the ruin 
of the monarchy. Nothing can be more dan- 
gerous than to drive a weak prince to acts of 
vigour which he is unable to sustain ; for when 
he has exhausted the terrors of words he has 
no other resource; the authority of the throne 
has been lowered, and the people have dis- 
covered the secret of their monarch's weak- 
ness." — P. 87. 

The Reformers in this country say, that these 
immense concessions of Louis failed in their 
effect of calming the popular effervescence, 



MIRABEAU. 



because they came too late. It is difficult to 
say what they call soon enough, when it is 
recollected that these concessions were made 
before the deputies had even verified their powers ; be- 
fore a single decree of the Assembly had passed, 
at the very opening of their sittings ; and when 
all their proceedings up to that hour had been 
an illegal attempt to centre in themselves all 
the powers of government. But, in truth, what 
rendered that solitary act of vigour so disas- 
trous was, that it was totally unsupported ; that 
no measures were simultaneously taken to 
make the royal authority respected; that the 
throne was worsted from its own want of fore- 
sight in the very first contest wifh the Com- 
mons, and above all, that the army betrayed their 
sovereign and rendered resistance impossible, 
by joining the rebels to his government. 

The National Assembly, like every other 
body which commits itself to the gale of popu- 
lar applause, experienced the utmost disquie- 
tude at the thoughts of punishing any of the 
excesses of their popular supporters. How 
exactly is the following description applicable 
to all times and nations ! 

" The disorders which were prolonged in the 
provinces, the massacres which stained the 
streets of Paris, induced many estimable per- 
sons to propose an address of the Assembly, 
condemnatory of such proceedings to the peo- 
ple. The Assembly, however, was so appre- 
hensive of offending the multitude, that they 
regarded as a snare every motion tending to re- 
press the disorders, or censure the popular excesses. 
Secret distrust and disquietude was at the 
bottom of every heart. They had triumphed 
by means of the people, and they could not 
venture to show themselves severe towards 
them; on the contrary, though they frequently 
declared, in the preambles of their decrees, 
that they were profoundly afflicted at the burn- 
ing of the chateaux and the insults to the no- 
bility, they rejoiced in heart at the propagation of 
a terror which they regarded as indispensable to their 
designs. They had reduced themselves to the 
necessity of fearing the noblesse, or being 
feared by them. They condemned publicly, 
they protected secretly ; they conferred com- 
pliments on the constituted authorities, and 
gave encouragement to license. Respect for 
the executive power was nothing but words of 
style; and in truth, when the ministers of the 
crown revealed the secret of their weakness, 
the Assembly, which remembered well its own 
terrors, was not displeased that fear had 
changed sides. If you are sufficiently power- 
ful to cause yourselves to be respected by the 
people, you will be sufficiently so to inspire us 
with dread ; that was the ruling feeling of the 
Cote Gauche."— P. 134. 

This is precisely a picture of what always 
must be the feeling in regard to tumult and 
disorders of all who have committed their 
political existence to the waves of popular 
support. However much, taken individually, 
they may disapprove of acts of violence, yet 
when they feel that intimidation of their oppo- 
nents is their sheet-anchor, they cannot have 
an insurmountable aversion to the deeds by 
which it is to be effected. They would prefer, 
indeed, th it terror should answer their pur- 



poses without the necessity of blows being 
actually inflicted; but if mere threats are in- 
sufficient, they never fail to derive a secret 
satisfaction from the recurrence of examples 
calculated to show what risks the enemy runs. 
The burning of castles, the sacking of towns, 
may indeed alienate the wise and the good; 
but alas ! the wise and the good form but a 
small proportion of mankind; and for one 
whose eyes are opened by the commencement 
of such deeds of horror, ten will be so much 
overawed, as to lose all power of acting in 
obedience to the newly awakened and better 
feelings of his mind. 

" Intimidation," as Lord Brougham has well 
observed, "is the never-failing resource of the 
partisans of revolution in all ages. Merc popu- 
larity is at first the instrument by which this unsteady 
legislature is governed; but when it becomes ap- 
parent that whoever can obtain the direction or 
command of it must possess the whole author- 
ity of the state, parties become less scrupulous 
about the means they employ for that purpose, and 
soon find out that violence and terror are infinitely 
more effectual and expeditious than persuasion and 
eloquence. Encouraged by this state of affairs, 
the most daring, unprincipled, and profligate, 
proceed to seize upon the defenceless legisla- 
ture, and, driving all their antagonists before 
them by violence or intimidation, enter without 
opposition upon the supreme functions of go- 
vernment. The arms, however, by which they 
had been victorious, are speedily turned against 
themselves, and those who are envious of their 
success, or ambitious of their distinction, easily 
find means to excite discontents among the 
multitude, and to employ them in pulling down 
the very individuals whom they had so recently 
elevated. This disposal of the legislature then 
becomes a prize to be fought for in the clubs 
and societies of a corrupted metropolis, and the 
institution of a national representation has no 
other effect than that of laying the government 
open to lawless force and flagitious audacity. 
It was in this manner that, from the want of a 
natural and efficient aristocracy to exercise the 
functions of hereditary legislators, the National 
Assembly of France was betrayed into extra- 
vagance, and fell a prey to faction; that the 
Institution itself became a source of public 
misery and disorder, and converted a civilized 
monarchy first into a sanguinary democracy, 
and then into a military despotism."* How 
exactly is the progress, here so well described, 
applicable to these times! "Take this bill or 
anarchy," says Mr. Macauley. — "Lord Grey," 
says the Times, "has brought the country into 
such a state, that he must either carry the 
Reform Bill or incur the responsibility of a 
revolution."f How exactly is the career of 
democratic insanity and revolutionary ambi- 
tion the same in all ages and countries ! 

Dumont, as already mentioned, was a lead- 
ing member of the committee which prepared 
the famous declaration on the Rights of Man. 
He gives the following interesting account of 
the revolt of a candid and sagacious mind at 
the absurdities which a regard to the popular 
opinion constrained them to adopt: — 

* Edinburgh Review, vi. 148. 
t Times, March 27, 1832. 



224 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



"Duroverai, Claviere, and myself, were 
named by Mirabeau to draw up that celebrated 
declaration. During the course of that mourn- 
ful compilation, reflections entered my mind 
which had never before found a place there. 
I soon perceived the ridiculous nature of the 
undertaking. A declaration of rights, I im- 
mediately saw, may be made after the procla- 
mation of a constitution, but not before it; for 
it is laws which give birth to rights — they do 
not follow them. Such general maxims are 
highly dangerous; you should never bind a 
legislature by general propositions, which it 
afterwards becomes necessary to restrain or 
modify. ' Men,' says the declaration, ' are born 
free and equal;' that is not true; they are so 
far from being born free, that they are born in 
a state of unavoidable weakness and depend- 
ence: Equal — where are theyl where can they 
be? It is in vain to talk of equality, when 
such extreme difference exists, and ever must 
exist, between the talents, fortune, virtues, in- 
dustry, and condition of men. In a word, I 
was so strongly impressed with the absurdity 
of the declaration of the Rights of Man, that for 
once I carried along with me the opinions of 
our little committee; and Mirabeau himself, 
when presenting the report to the Assembly, 
ventured to suggest difficulties, and to propose 
that the declaration of rights should be delayed 
till the constitution was completed. 'I tell 
you,' said he, in his forcible style, 'that any 
declaration of rights you may make before the 
constitution is framed, will never be but a one 
year's almanac' Mirabeau, always satisfied 
with a happy expression, never gave himself 
the trouble to get to the bottom of any subject, 
and never would go through the toil to put 
himself in possession of facts sufficient to de- 
fend what he advanced. On this occasion he 
suffered under this: this sudden change be- 
came the subject of bitter reproach. ' Who is 
this,' said the Jacobins, 'who seeks to employ 
his ascendant over the Assembly, to make us 
say yes and no alternately! Shall we be for 
ever the puppets of his contradictions V There 
was so much reason in what he had newly 
advanced, that he would have triumphed if he 
had been able to bring it out; but he aban- 
doned the attempt at the very time when seve- 
ral deputies were beginning to unite themselves 
to him. The deplorable nonsense went tri- 
umphantly on, and generated that unhappy 
declaration of the Rights of Man which subse- 
quently produced such incredible mischief. I 
am in possession at this moment of a complete 
refutation of it, article by article, by the hand 
of a great master, and it proves to demonstra- 
tion the contradictions, the absurdities, the 
dangers of that seditious composition, which 
of itself was sufficient to overturn the consti- 
tution of which it formed a part; like a pow- 
der magazine placed below an edifice, which 
the first spark will blow into the air." — Pp. 
141, 142. 

These are the words of sober and expe- 
rienced wisdom ; and coming, as they do, from 
one of the authors of this celebrated declara- 
tion, are of the very highest importance. They 
prove, that at the very time when Mirabeau and 
the popular party in the Assembly were draw- 



ing up their perilous and highly inflammatory 
declaration, they were aware of its absurdity, I 
and wished to suppress the work of their own 
hands. They could not do so, however, and 
were constrained, by the dread of losing their 
popularity, to throw into the bosom of an ex- 
cited people a firebrand, which they themselves 
foresaw would speedily lead to a conflagration. 
Such is the desperate, the hopeless state of 
slavery, in which, during periods of excite- 
ment, the representatives of the mob are held 
by their constituents. The whole purposes 
of a representative form of government are at 
once destroyed; the wisdom, experience, study, 
and reflection of the superior class of states- 
men are trodden under foot; and the enlight- 
ened have no chance of keeping possession of 
the reins of power, or even influencing the 
legislature, but by bending to the passions of 
the ignorant. 

This consideration affords a decisive argu- 
ment in favour of the close, aye, the nomination 
boroughs. Their existence, and their exist- 
ence in considerable numbers, is indispensable 
towards the voice of truth being heard in the 
national councils in periods of excitement, and 
the resistance to those measures of innovation, 
which threaten to destroy the liberties, and 
terminate the prosperity, of the people. From 
the popular representatives during such pe- 
riods it is in vain to expect the language of 
truth; for it would be as unpalatable to the 
sovereign multitude as to a sovereign despot. 
Members of the legislature, therefore, are in- 
dispensably necessary in considerable num- 
bers, who, by having no popular constituents, can 
venture to speak out the truth in periods of 
agitation, innovation, and alarm. The Re- 
formers ask, what is the use of a representa- 
tive of a green mound, or a ruined tower, in a 
popular parliament? We answer, that he is 
more indispensable in such a parliament than 
in any other. Nay, that without such a class 
the liberties of the nation cannot exist for any 
long period. Representatives constantly act- 
ing under the influence or dread of popular 
constituents, never will venture, either in their 
speeches to give vent to the language of truth, 
nor in their conduct to support the cause of 
real freedom, if it interferes with the real or 
supposed interests of their constituents. They 
will always be as much under the influence of 
their tyrannical task-masters, as Mirabeau and 
Dumont were in drawing up, against their 
better judgment, the Rights of Man. It is as 
absurd to expect rational or independent mea- 
sures from such a class, in opposition to the 
wishes or injunctions of those who returned 
them to parliament, as it is to look for freedom 
of conduct from the senate of Tiberius or the 
council of Napoleon. We do not expect the 
truth to be spoken by the representative of a 
mound, in a question with its owner, or his 
class in society, nor by the representatives of 
the people, in a question which interests or 
excites the public ambition. But we expect 
that truth will be spoken by the representa- 
tives of the people, as against the interests of 
the owner of the mound ; and by the repre- 
sentatives of the mound, as against the pas- 
sions of the people ; and that thus, between the 



MIRABEAU. 



223 



two, the language of reason will be raised on 
every subject, and that fatal bias the public 
mind prevented, which arises from one set of 
doctrines and principles being alone presented 
to their consideration. In the superior fear- 
lessness and vigour of the language of the 
Conservative party in the House of Lords, to 
what is exhibited in the House of Commons, 
on the Reform question, is to be found decisive 
evidence of the truth of these principles, and 
their application to this country and this age. 

Of the fatal 4th August, " the St. Barthelemy 
of properties," as it was well styled by Rivarol, 
and its ruinous consequences upon the public 
welfare, we have the following striking and 
graphic account: — 

" Never was such an undertaking accom- 
plished in so short a time. That which would 
have required a year of care, meditation, and 
debate, was proposed, deliberated on, and voted 
by acclamation. I know not how many laws 
were decreed in that one sitting; the abolition 
of feudal rights, of the tithes, of provincial pri- 
vileges ; three articles, which of themselves 
embraced a complete system of jurisprudence 
and politics, with ten or twelve others, were 
decided in less time than would be required in 
England for the first reading of a bill of ordi- 
nary importance. They began with a report 
on the disorders of the provinces, chateaux 
burnt, troops of banditti who attacked the 
nobles and ravaged the fields. The Duke 
d'Aguillon, the Duke de Noailles, and several 
others of the democratic part of the nobility, 
after the most disastrous pictures of these 
calamities, exclaimed that nothing but a great 
act of generosity could calm the people, and 
that it was high time to abandon their odious 
privileges, and let the people taste the full 
benefits of the Revolution. An indescribable 
effervescence seized upon the Assembly. 
Every one proposed sacrifice: every one laid 
some offering on the altar of their country, 
proposing either to denude themselves or de- 
nude others; no time was allowed for reflec- 
tion, objection, or argument; a sentimental 
contagion seized every heart. That renuncia- 
tion of privileges, that abandonment of so 
many rights burdensome to the people, these 
multiplied sacrifices, had an air of magnanim- 
ity which withdrew the attention from the fatal 
precipitance with which they were made. I 
saw on that night many good and worthy 
deputies who literally wept for joy at seeing 
the work of regeneration advance so rapidly, 
and at feeling themselves every instant carried 
on the wings of enthusiasm so far beyond their 
most ardent hopes. The renunciation of the 
privileges of provinces was made by their re- 
spective representatives ; those of Brittany had 
engaged to defend them, and therefore they 
were more embarrassed than the rest; but 
carried away by the general enthusiasm, they 
advanced in a body, and declared in a body, 
that they would use their utmost efforts with 
their constituents to obtain the renunciation 
of their privileges. That great and superb 
operation was necessary to confer political 
unity upon a monarchy which had been suc- 
cessively formed by the union of many inde- 
pendent states, every one of which had certain 
29 



rights of its own anterior to their being blended 
together. 

" On the following day, every one began to 
reflect on what had been done, and sinister 
presentiments arose on all sides. Mirabeau 
and Sieyes, in particular, who had not been 
present at that famous sitting, condemned in 
loud terms its enthusiastic follies. This is a 
true picture of France, said they; we spend a 
month in disputing about words, and we make 
sacrifices in a night which overturn every 
thing that is venerable in the monarchy. In 
the subsequent meetings, they tried to retract 
or modify some of these enormous conces- 
sions, but it was too late ; it was impossible to 
withdraw what the people already looked upon 
as their rights. The Abbe Sieyes, in particu- 
lar, made a discourse full of reason and justice 
against the extinction of tilhcs, which he looked 
upon with the utmost aversion. He demon- 
strated, that to extinguish the tithes, was to 
spoliate the clergy of its property, solely to 
enrich the proprietors of the lands ; for every 
one having bought or inherited his estate 
minus the value of the tithe, found himself 
suddenly enriched by a tenth, which was given 
to him as a pure and uncalled for gratuity. It 
was this speech, which never can be refuted, which 
terminated with the well-known expression : — 
' They would be free, and they know not how 
to be just.' The prejudice was so strong, 
that Sieyes himself was not listened to; he 
was regarded merely as an ecclesiastic, who 
could not get the better of his personal interest, 
and paid that tribute of error to his robe. A 
little more would have made him be hooted and 
hissed. I saw him the next day, full of bitter 
indignation against the injustice and brutality 
of the Assembly, which in truth he never after- 
wards forgave. He gave vent to his indigna- 
tion, in a conversation with Mirabeau, who 
replied, ' My dear Abbe, you have unchained the 
bull ; do you expect he is not to gore ivith his horns f 

" These decrees of Aug. 4 were so far from 
putting a period to the robbery and violence 
which desolated the country, that they only 
tended to make the people acquainted with 
their own strength, and impress them with the 
conviction that all their outrages against the 
nobility would not only not be punished, but 
actually rewarded. Again I say, every thing 
which is done from fear fails in accomplish- 
ing its object ; those whom you expect to disarm by 
concessions, only redouble in confidence and auda- 
city."— Pp. 146—149. 

Such is the conclusion of this enlightened 
French Reformer, as to the consequences of 
the innovations and concessions, in promoting 
which he took so large a share, and which 
it was then confidently expected, would not 
only pacify the people but regenerate the mon- 
archy, and commence a new era in the history 
of the world. These opinions coming from 
the author of the Rights of Man, the preceptor 
of Mirabeau, the fellow-labourer of Bentham, 
should, if any thing can, open the eyes of our 
young enthusiasts, who are so vehement in 
urging the necessity of concession, avowedly 
from the effects of intimidation, who expect to 
"let loose the bull and escape his horns." 

It is on this question of the effects to be ex- 



226 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



pected from concession to public clamour, that 
the whole question of Reform hinges. The 
supporters of the bill in both Houses have 
abandoned every other argument. "Pass this 
bill, or anarchy will ensue," is their sole princi- 
ple of action. But what says Dumont, taught by 
the errors of the Constituent Assembly ? "Pass 
this bill, and anarchy will ensue." " Whatever 
is done," says he, " from fear, fails in its object ; 
those whom you expect to disarm by conces- 
sion, redouble in confidence and audacity." 
This is the true principle; the principle con- 
firmed by universal experience, and yet the 
Reformers shut their eyes to its application. 
The events which have occurred in this age 
are so decisive on this subject, that nothing 
more convincing could be imagined, if a voice 
from the dead were to proclaim its truth. 

Concession, as Dumont tells us, and as every 
one acquainted with history knows, was tried 
by the French government and Assembly, in 
the hope of calming the people, and arresting 
the Revolution. The monarch, at the opening 
of the States-General, made "greater conces- 
sions than ever king made to his people ;" the 
nobles abandoned, on their own motion, in one 
night, all their rights; and what was the con- 
sequence ] The revolutionary fervour was 
urged into a fury ; the torrent became a cata- 
ract, and horrors unparalleled in the history of 
the world ensued. 

Resistance to popular ambition, a firm op- 
position to the cry for reform, was at the same 
period, under a lion-hearted king and an in- 
trepid minister, adopted in the midst of the 
greatest dangers by the British government. 
What was the consequence] Universal tran- 
quillity — forty years of unexampled prosperity 
— the triumph of Trafalgar — the conquest of 
Waterloo. 

Conciliation and concession, in obedience, 
and with the professed design of healing the 
disturbances of that unhappy land, were next 
tried in Ireland. Universal tranquillity, con- 
tentment, and happiness, were promised from 
the great healing measure of emancipation. 
What has been the consequence? Disturb- 
ances, massacres, discord, practised sedition, 
threatened rebellion, which have made the old 
times of Protestant rule be regretted. 

Conciliation and concession were again put 
in practice by the Whig Administration of 
England. What was the result 1 Perils great- 
er than assailed the monarchy from all the 
might of Napoleon; dissension, conflagration, 
and popular violence, unexampled since the 
great rebellion; a falling income and an in- 
creasing expenditure; the flames of a servile 
war in Jamaica ; and general distress unequal- 
led since the accession of the House of Bruns- 
wick. 

The character of Mirabeau, both as a writer 
and orator, and an individual, is sketched with 
no ordinary power by this author, probably 
better qualified than any man in existence to 
portray it with accuracy: — 

" Mirabeau had within his breast a sense of 
the force of his mind, which sustained his 
courage in situations which would have crush- 
ed a person of ordinary character : his imagi- 
nation loved the vast; his mind seized the 



gigantic ; his taste vr-\s natural, and had been 
cultivated by the study of the classical authors. 
He knew little ; but no one could make a bet- 
ter use of what he had acquired. During the 
whirlwind of his stormy life he had little lei- 
sure for study; but in his prison of Vincennes 
he had read extensively, and improv'ed his style 
by translations, as well as extensive collections 
from the writings of great orators. He had 
little confidence in the extent of his erudition ; 
but his eloquent and impassioned soul animat- 
ed every feature of his countenance when he 
was moved, and nothing was easier than to 
inflame his imagination. From his youth up- 
wards he had accustomed himself to the dis- 
cussion of the great questions of erudition and 
government, but he was not calculated to go to 
the bottom of them. The labour of investiga- 
tion was not adapted to his powers ; he had too 
much warmth and vehemence of disposition 
for laborious application ; his mind proceeded 
by leaps and bounds, but sometimes they were 
prodigious. His style abounded in vigorous 
expressions, of which he had made a particu- 
lar study. 

" If we consider him as an author, we must 
recollect that all his writings, without one 
single exception, were pieces of Mosaic, in 
which his fellow-labourers had at least as large 
a share as himself, but he had the faculty of 
giving additional eclat to their labours, by 
throwing in here and there original expres- 
sions, or apostrophes, full of fire and elo- 
quence. It is a peculiar talent, to be able in 
this manner to disinter obscure ability, intrust 
to each the department for which he is fitted, 
and induce them all to labour at the work of 
which he alone is to reap the glory. 

"As a political orator, he was in some re- 
spects gifted with the very highest talents — a 
quick eye, a sure tact, the art of discovering at 
once the true disposition of the assembly he 
was addressing, and applying all the force of 
his mind to overcome the point of resistance, 
without weakening it by the discussion of 
minor topics. No one knew better how to 
strike with a single word, or hit his mark with 
perfect precision ; and frequently he thus 
carried with him the general opinion, either 
by a happy insinuation, or a stroke which in- 
timidated his adversaries. In the tribune he 
was immovable. The waves of faction rolled 
around without shaking him, and he was 
master of his passions in the midst of the ut- 
most vehemence of opposition. But what he 
wanted as a political orator, was the art of dis- 
cussion on the topics on which he enlarged. 
He could not embrace a long series of proofs 
and reasonings, and was unable to refute in a 
logical or convincing manner. He was, in 
consequence, often obliged to abandon the 
most important motions, when hard pressed 
by his adversaries, from pure inability to re- 
fute their arguments. He embraced too much, 
and reflected too little. He plunged into a dis- 
course made for him on a subject on which he 
had never reflected, and on which he had been 
at no pains to master the facts ; and he was, 
in consequence, greatly inferior in that particu- 
lar to the athlette who exhibit their powers in 
the British parliament." — P. 277. 



MIRABEAU. 



227 



What led to the French Revolution ? This 
question will be asked and discussed, with all 
the anxiety it deserves, to the end of the world. 
— Let us hear Dumont on the subject. 

"No event ever interested Europe so much 
as the meeting of the States-General. There 
was no enlightened man who did not found the 
greatest hopes upon that public struggle of 
prejudices with the lights of the age, and who 
did not believe that a new moral and political 
world was about to issue from the chaos. The 
bettoin of hope was so strong, that all faults 
were pardoned, all misfortunes were represent- 
ed only as accident ; in spite of all the calami- 
ties which it induced, the balance leaned always 
towards the Constituent Assembly. — It was the 
struggle of humanity with despotism. 

" The States-General, six weeks after their 
convocation, was no longer the States-General, 
but the National Assembly. Its first calamity 
was to have owed its new title to a revolution ; 
that is to say, to a vital change in its power, 
its essence, its name, and its means of authority. 
According to the constitution, the commons 
should have acted in conjunction with the 
nobles, the clergy, and the king. But the com- 
mons, in the very outset, subjugated the nobles, 
the clergy, and the king. It ivas in that, that the 
Revolution consisted. 

"Reasoning without end has taken place on 
the causes of the Revolution ; there is but one, 
in my opinion, to which the whole is to be as- 
cribed; and that is, the character of the king. 
Put a king of character and firmness in the place 
of Louis XVI., and no revolution would have en- 
sued. His whole reign was a preparation for 
it. There was not a single epoch, during the 
whole Constituent Assembly, in which the 
king, if he could only have changed his cha- 
racter, might not have re-established his au- 
thority, and created a mixed constitution far 
more solid and stable than its ancient mon- 
archy. His indecision, his weakness, his half 
counsels, his want of foresight, ruined every 
thing. The inferior causes which have con- 
curred were nothing but the necessary conse- 
quences of that one moving cause. When the 
king is known to be weak, the courtiers be- 
come intriguers, the factious insolent, the 
people audacious ; good men are intimidated, 
the most faithful services go unrewarded, able 
men are disgusted, and ruinous councils adopt- 
ed. A king possessed of dignity and firmness 
would have drawn to his side those who were 
against him ; the Lafayettes, the La-meths, the 
Mirabeaus, the Sieyes, would never have 
dreamed of playing the part which they did; 
and, when directed to other objects, they would 
no longer have appeared the same men." — 
Pp. 343, 344. 

These observations are of the very highest 
importance. The elements of discord, rebel- 
lion, and anarchy, rise into portentous energy 
when weakness is at the head of affairs. A 
reforming, in other words a democratic, ad- 
ministration, raise them into a perfect tempest. 
The progress of time, and the immense defects 
of the ancient monarchical system, rendered 
change necessary in France; but it was the 
weakness of the king, the concessions of the 
nobility and clergy, which converted it into a 



revolution. All the miseries of that country 
sprung from the very principle which is in- 
cessantly urged as the ruling consideration in 
favour of the Reform Bill. 

No body of men ever inflicted such disasters 
on France, as the Constituent Assembly, by 
their headlong innovations and sweeping de- 
molitions. Not the sword of Marlborough nor 
the victories of Wellington — not the rout of 
Agincourt nor the carnage of Waterloo — not 
the arms of Alexander nor the ambition of Na- 
poleon, have proved so fatal to its prosperity. 
From the wounds they inflicted, the social sys- 
tem may revive — from those of their own in- 
novators, recovery is impossible. They not 
only destroyed freedom in its cradle — they not 
only induced the most cruel and revolting 
tyranny : but they totally destroyed the mate- 
rials from which it was to be reconstructed in 
future, — they bequeathed slavery to their chil- 
dren, and they prevented it from ever being 
shaken off by their descendants. It matters not 
under what name arbitrary power is adminis- 
tered : it can be dealt out as rudely by a reform- 
ing assembly, a dictatorial mob, a committee 
of Public Safety, a tyrannical Directory, a mili- 
tary despot, or a citizen King, as by an abso- 
lute monarch or a haughty nobility. By destroy- 
ing the whole ancient institutions of France — 
by annihilating the nobles and middling ranks, 
who stood between the people and the throne 
— by subverting all the laws and customs of 
antiquity — by extirpating religion, and induc- 
ing general profligacy, they have inflicted 
wounds upon their country which can never 
be healed. Called upon to revive the social 
system, they destroyed it: instead of pouring 
into the decayed limbs the warm blood of youth, 
they severed the head from the body, and all 
subsequent efforts have been unavailing to re- 
store animation. It is now as impossible to 
give genuine freedom, that is complete protec- 
tion to all classes, to France, as it is to restore 
the vital spark to a lifeless body by the convul- 
sions of electricity. The balance of interests, 
the protecting classes, are destroyed: nothing 
remains but the populace and the government: 
Asiatic has succeeded to European civiliza- 
tion : and, instead of the long life of modern 
freedom, the brief tempests of anarchy, and f he 
long night of despotism, are its fate. 

The Constituent Assembly, however, had 
the excuse of general delusion : they were en- 
tering on an untrodden field : the consequence 
of their actions were unknown : enthusiasm 
as irresistible as that of the theatre urged on 
their steps. Great reforms required to be made 
in the political system; they mistook the ex- 
cesses of democratic ambition for the dictates 
of ameliorating wisdom : the corruption of a 
guilty court, and the vices of a degraded no- 
bility, called loudly for amendment. But what 
shall we say to those who adventured on the 
same perilous course, with their fatal example 
before their eyes, in a country requiring nc 
accession to popular power, tyrannized over by 
no haughty nobility, consumed by no internal 
vices, weakened by no foreign disasters 1 
What shall we say to those who voluntarily 
shut their eyes to all the perils of the head- 
long reformers of the neighbouring kingdom, 



228 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



who roused passions as impetuous, proposed 
changes as sweeping, were actuated by ambi- 
tion as perilous, as that which, under their own 
eyes, had torn civilization to pieces in its bleed- 
ing dominion 1 What shall we say to those 
who did this in the state where freedom had 
existed longer, and was at their accession more 
unfettered than in any other country that ever 
existed; where prosperity unexampled existed, 



and virtue uncorrupted was to be found, and 
glory unparalleled had been won! Who ad- 
ventured on a course which threatened to tear 
in pieces the country of Milton and Bacon, of 
Scott and Newton, of Nelson and Wellington ? 
History will judge their conduct: no tumultu- 
ous mobs will drown its voice: from its deci- 
sion there will be no appeal, and its will be the 
voice of ages. 



BULWER'S ATHENS.* 



It is a remarkable fact, that so numerous 
and pregnant are the proofs afforded by history 
in all ages, of the universal and irremediable 
evils of democratic ascendency, that thece is 
hardly an historical writer of any note, in any 
country or period of the world, who has not 
concurred in condemning it as the most dan- 
gerous form of government, and the most fatal 
enemy of that freedom which it professes to 
support. In the classical writers, indeed, are 
to be found numerous and impassioned, as 
well as perfectly just eulogies on the ennobling 
effects of civil liberty; but it is liberty, as con- 
tradistinguished from slavery, which is the ob- 
ject of their encomium : and none felt so strong- 
ly, or have expressed so forcibly, the pernicious 
tendency of unbridled democracy to undermine 
and destroy the civil freedom and general pro- 
tection of all classes, which is unquestionably 
the first of human blessings. Thucydides, 
whose profound mind was forcibly attracted 
by the varied operations of the aristocratic and 
democratic factions, which in his age distract- 
ed Greece, and whose conflict forms the sub- 
ject of his immortal work, has told us, that " in- 
variably in civil contests it was found at 
Athens that the worst and most abandoned 
public characters obtained the ascendency." 
Aristotle has condensed in six words the ever- 
lasting characteristic of democratic govern- 
ment TI/TT^V TtoV TVgZniSliV TiXiVTltil » Sti/J.lK^fTla. 

Sallust has pointed to the " Egestas cupida no- 
varum rerum," as the most prolific source of 
the evils which first undermined, and at last 
overthrew the solid foundations of Roman 
liberty; and left in his Catiline conspiracy a 
picture of the demagogue, so just and true in 
all its touches, that in every age it has the air 
of having been drawn from the existing popu- 
lar idol; and the phrase "Alieni appetens, sui 
profusus," has passed into a proverbial charac- 
teristic of that mixture of rapacity and insol- 
vency which ever forms the basis of the cha- 
racters who attain to democratic ascendency. 
Livy, amidst the majestic and heart-stirring 
narrative of Roman victories, never loses an 
opportunity of throwing in a reflection on the 
mingled instability and tyranny of popular as- 
semblies; and all the experience of the woful 
tyranny which the triumph of democracy under 
Cassar brought upon the Roman common- 



* Athens, its Rise and Fall. By E. I.. Bulwer, Esq. 
Saunders and Otley : London, 1837. Blackwood's Maga- 
zine, July, 1837. 



wealth, and the leaden chains of the centralized 
government of his successors, has not blinded 
the far-seeing sagacity of Tacitus to the origin 
of all these evils in the wide-spread force of 
popular wickedness and folly, and the fatal 
overthrow of the long established sway of the 
Senate by the military talents and consummate 
address of the first emperor of the world. 

In modern times the same striking charac- 
teristic of all the greatest observers of human 
events is equally conspicuous. Five hundred 
years ago Machiavel deduced from a careful 
retrospect of Roman history, not less than the 
experience of the Republican States with which 
he was surrounded, the clearest views of the 
enormous perils of unbridled democracy: and 
he has left in his Discourses on Livy and 
" Principe," maxims of government essentially 
adverse to democratic establishments, which, 
in depth of thought and justice of observation, 
have never been surpassed. Bacon clearly 
perceived, even amidst all the servility of the 
nation, and tyranny of the government of Eng- 
land under the Tudor princes, the opposite 
dangers of republican rule, and his celebrated 
apophthegm, that political changes, to be safe, 
" should resemble those of nature, which albeit 
the greatest in the end, are imperceptible in 
their progress," has passed into a consuetudi- 
nary maxim, to which, to the end of the world, 
the wise will never cease to refer, and against 
which the rash and reckless will never cease 
to chafe. The profound mind of Hume, it is 
well known, beheld the long and varied story 
of England's existence with perhaps too great 
a bias in favour of monarchical institutions ; 
and Gibbon, even amidst the long series of 
calamities which accumulated round the sink- 
ing fortunes of the empire, has sufficiently 
evinced his strong sense of the impracticable 
nature, and tyrannic tendency of democratic 
institutions.* Sir James Mackintosh, in his 
maturer years, strongly supported the same 
sound and rational principles; and all the fer- 
vour and energy of the youthful author of the 
Yiwiina- Gatticce could not blind his better in- 
formed judgment later in life, to the frightful 
dangers of democratic ascendency, and the ul- 
timate conclusion "that the only government 
which offers a rational prospect of establishing 
or preserving freedom, is that where the power 



*In his letters and and miscellaneous works, his 
opinions on this subject are clearly expressed. 



BULWER'S ATHENS. 



229 



of directing affairs is vested in the aristocratic 
interests, under the perpetual safeguard of po- 
pular watchfulness."* Burke, almost forgot- 
ten as a champion of Whig doctrines in the 
earlier part of his career, stands forth in im- 
perishable lustre as the giant supporter of 
conservative principles in the zenith of his in- 
tellect. Pitt has told us that " democracy is 
not the government of the few by the many, 
hut the many by the few, with this addition, 
that the few who are thus raised to power are 
the most dangerous and worthless of the com- 
munity;" and Fox, who spent his life in sup- 
porting liberal principles, with his dying breath 
bequeathed to his successors a perpetual strug- 
gle with the gigantic power which had risen 
out of its spirit, and imbodied its desires. 

Nor is France behind England in the same 
profound and far-seeing views of human af- 
fairs. Napoleon, elevated on the wave, and 
supported by the passions of the Revolution, 
conceived himself, as he himself told, to be the 
commissioned hand of Heaven to chastise its 
crimes and extinguish its atrocity. Madam de 
Stael, albeit passionately devoted to the me- 
mory of her father, the parent of the Revolution, 
and the author of the French Reform Bill, has 
yet devoted the maturity of her intellect to il- 
lustrate the superior advantages which the 
mixed form of government established in Eng- 
land afforded ; and in her Treatise on the 
French Revolution, supported with equal wis- 
dom and eloquence the conservative princi- 
ples, in which all minds of a certain elevation 
in every age have concurred: while Chateau- 
briand, the illustrious relic of feudal grandeur, 
and the graphic painter of modern suffering, 
has arrived, from the experience of his varied 
and interesting existence, at the same lofty and 
ennobling conclusions; and M. deToqueville, 
the worthy conclusion to such a line of great- 
ness, has portrayed, amidst the most impartial 
survey of American equality, seeds in the un- 
disguised " tyranny of the majority," of the 
eventual and speedy destruction of civil li- 
berty. 

These enemies of democracy in every age. 
have been led to these conclusions, just because 
they were the steadiest friends of freedom. They 
deprecated and resisted the unbridled sway of 
the people, because they saw clearly that it 
was utterly destructive to their real and dura- 
ble interests; that it permitted that sacred fire 
which, duly restrained and repressed, is the 
fountain of all greatness, whether in nations 
or individuals, to waste itself in pernicious 
flames, or expand into ruinous conflagration. 
They supported the establishment of Conser- 
vative checks on popular extravagance, be- 
cause they perceived from experience, and had 
learned from history, that the gift of unbridled 
power is fatal to its possessors, and that least 
of all is it tolerable where the responsibility, 
the sole check upon its excesses, is destroyed 
by the number among whom it is divided. 
They advocated a mixed form of government, 
because they saw clearly, that under such, and 
such only, had the blessings of freedom in any 
age been enjoyed for any length of time by the 

♦ Mackintosh's Memoirs, I. 174. 



people. The}^ were fully aware that demo- 
cratic energy has, in every age, been the 
mainspring of human improvement ; but they 
were not less aware, that this spring is one of 
such strength and power, that if not duly 
loaded, it immediately tears the machine to 
pieces. They admired and cherished the 
warmth of the fire, but they were not so 
blinded by its advantages, as to permit it to 
escape its iron bars, and wrap the house in 
flames; they enjoyed the vigour of the horses 
which whirled the chariot along; but they 
were not so insane as to cast the charioteer 
from his seat, and allow their strength and 
energy to overturn and destroy the vehicle: 
they acknowledged with gratitude the genial 
warmth of the central heat, which clothed the 
sides of the volcano with luxuriant fruits; but 
they looked to either hand, and beheld in the 
black furrow of desolation the track of the 
burning lava which had issued from its sum- 
mit when it escaped its barriers, and filled the 
heavens with an eruption. 

Nothing daunted by this long and majestic 
array of authority against him, Mr. Bulwer 
has taken the field in two octavo volumes, in 
order to illustrate the beneficial effect of re- 
publican institutions upon social greatness 
and national prosperity. He has selected for 
his subject the Athenian democracy — the eye 
of Greece — the cradle of history, tragedy, and 
the fine arts ; the spot in the world where, in 
the narrowest limits, achievements the most 
mighty have been won, and genius the most 
immortal has been developed. He con- 
ceived, doubtless, that in Attica at least the 
extraordinary results of democratic agency 
could not be disputed; the Roman victories 
might be traced to the wisdom of the senate ; 
the Swiss patriotism to the simplicity of its 
mountains; the prosperity of Holland to the 
protection of canals, cr the prudence of its 
burgomasters; the endurance of America to 
the boundless vent afforded by its back settle- 
ments ; but in Athens none of these peculiari- 
ties existed, and there the brilliant results of 
popular rule and long established self-govern- 
ment were set forth in imperishable colours. 
We rejoice he has made the attempt; we anti- 
cipate nothing but good to the conservative 
cause from his efforts. It is a common saying 
among lawyers, that falsehood may be exposed 
in a witness by cross-examination ; but that 
truth only comes out the more clearly from all 
the efforts which are made for its confusion. 
It is a fortunate day for the cause of historic 
truth when the leaders of the democratic party 
leave the declamation of the hustings and the 
base flattery of popular adulation, and betake 
themselves to the arena of real argument. 
We feel the same joy at beholding Mr. Bulwer 
arm himself in the panoply of the field, and 
court the assaults of historical investigation, 
with which the knights of old saw themselves 
extricated from the mob of plebeian insurrec- 
tion, and led forth to the combat of highborn 
chivalry. 

Mr. Bulwer is, in every point of view, a dis- 
tinguished writer. His work on England and 
the English is a brilliant performance, abound- 
ing with sparkling, containing some profound, 
U 



230 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



observations, and particularly interesting to 
the multitude of persons to whom foreign tra- 
velling has rendered the comparison of Eng- 
lish and French character and institutions an 
object of interest. His novels in profound 
knowledge of the human heart, brilliancy of 
description, pathos of incident, and eloquence 
of language, are second to none in the English 
language. The great defects of his writings, 
in a political point of view, are the total ab- 
sence of any reference to a superintending 
power and the moral government of the world ; 
and the continual and laboured attempt to ex- 
culpate the errors, and screen the vices, and 
draw a veil over the perils of democratic go- 
vernment. The want of the first, in an inves- 
tigation into human affairs, is like the absence 
of the character of Hamlet in the play bearing 
his name: the presence of the second a con- 
tinued drawback on the pleasures which an 
impartial mind derives from his otherwise 
able and interesting observations. More espe- 
cially is a constant sense of the corruption 
and weakness of human nature an indispen- 
sable element in every inquiry or observation 
which has for its object the weighing the capa- 
bility of mankind to bear the excitements, and 
wield the powers, and exercise the responsi- 
bility of self-government. We are not going 
to enter into any theological argument on 
original sin, how intimately soever it may be 
blended with the foundation of all investiga- 
tions into the right principles of government ; 
we assert only a fact, demonstrated by the ex- 
perience of every age, and acquiesced in by 
the wise of every country, that there is an 
universal tendency to corruption and license 
in human nature — that religion is the only 
effectual bridle on its excesses, and that the 
moment that a community is established, with- 
out the effective agency of that powerful curb 
on human passion, the progress of national 
affairs becomes nothing but the career of the 
prodigal, brilliant and alluring in the outset, 
dismal and degrading in the end. It is on this 
account that the friends of freedom have in 
every age been the most resolute and perse- 
vering enemies of democracy; because that 
fervent and searching element, essential to the 
highest national greatness, and the best ingre- 
dient in its prosperity, if duly coerced and 
tempered, becomes its most devouring and 
fatal enemy the instant that it breaks through 
its barriers, and obtains the unrestrained di- 
rection of the public destinies. 

The views of the republican and the demo- 
crat are the very reverse of all this. Accord- 
ing to them, wickedness and corruption are the 
inheritance of the oligarchy alone ; aristocra- 
cies are always selfish, grasping, rapacious ; 
democracies invariably energetic, generous, 
confiding. Nobles, they argue, never act but 
from designing or selfish views ; their constant 
agent is human corruption ; their incessant 
appeal to the basest and most degrading prin- 
ciples of our nature. Republicans alone are 
really philanthropic in their views ; they alone 
attend to the interests of the masses; they alone 
lay the foundations of the social system on the 
broad basis of general well-being. Monarchi- 
cal governments are founded on the caprice of 



a single tyrant; aristocratic on the wants of a 
rapacious oligarchy; democratic alone on the 
consulted desires and grateful experience of 
the whole community. If these propositions 
were all true, they would be decisive in favour 
of popular, and highly popular institutions ; 
but unfortunately, though it is perfectly correct 
that monarchies and aristocracies are mainly 
directed, if uncontrolled by the people, to sup- 
port the interests of a single or an oligarchical 
government, it is no less true, that the rapacity 
of a democracy is just as great; that the re- 
sponsibility of its leaders, from the number of 
those invested with power, is infinitely less, 
and that the calamities which, in its unmiti- 
gated form it in consequence lets loose on the 
community, are such as in every age have led 
to its speedy subversion. 

The Conservative principle of government, 
on the other hand, is, that mankind are radi- 
cally and universally corrupt; that when in- 
vested with power, in whatever form of govern- 
ment, and from whatever class of society, they 
are immediately inclined to apply it to their 
own selfish ends ; that the diffusion of education 
and knowledge has no tendency whatever to 
eradicate this universal propensity, but only 
gives it a different, less violent, but not less 
interested direction ; — that the diffusion of su- 
preme power among a multitude of hands di- 
minishes to nothing the responsibility of each 
individual, while it augments in a proportionate 
degree the rapacity and selfishness which is 
brought to bear on public affairs; — that when 
the multitude are the spectators of government, 
they are inclined to check or restrain its abuses, 
because others profit, and they suffer by them; 
but when they become government itself, they 
instantly support them, because they profit, and 
others suffer from their continuance; — that 
democratic institutions thus, when once fully 
and really established, rapidly deprave the 
public mind, and engender an universal spirit 
of selfishness in the majority of the people, 
which speedily subverts the foundations of 
national prosperity; and that it is only when 
property is the directing, and numbers the con- 
trolling power, that the inherent vices and self- 
ishness of the depositaries of authority can be 
effectually coerced by the opinion of the great 
majority who are likely to sutler by its ex- 
cesses, or a lasting foundation be laid in the 
adherence of national opinion to the principles 
of virtue for any lengthened enjoyment of the 
blessings of prosperity, or any durable dis- 
charge of the commands of duty. 

These are the opposite and conflicting prin- 
ciples of government which are now at issue 
in the world: and it is to support the former 
that Mr. Bulwer has brought the power of a 
cultivated mind and the vigour of an enlarged 
intellect. Athens was a favourable ground to 
take, in order to enforce the incalculable pow- 
ers of the democratic spring in society. No- 
where else is to be found a state so small in 
its origin, and yet so great in its progress : so 
contracted in its territory, and yet so gigantic 
in its achievements : so limited in numbers, 
and yet so immortal in genius. Its dominions 
on the continent of Greece did not exceed an 
English county; its free inhabitants never 



BULWER'S ATHENS. 



231 



amounted to thirty thousand citizens — yet these 
inconsiderable numbers have filled the world 
with their renown ; poetry, philosophy, archi- 
tecture, sculpture, tragedy, comedy, geometry, 
physics, history, politics, almost date their 
origin from Athenian genius ; and the monu- 
ments of art with which they have overspread 
the world still form the standard of taste in 
every civilized nation on earth. It is not sur- 
prising that so brilliant and captivating a 
spectacle should in every age have dazzled and 
transported mankind ; and that seeing demo- 
cratic institutions co-existing with so extra- 
ordinary a development of the intellectual 
faculties, it should have come to be generally 
imagined that they really were cause and effect, 
and that the only secure foundation which could 
be laid for the attainment of the highest hon- 
ours of our being was in the extension of the 
powers of government to the great body of the 
people. 

Athens, however, has its dark as well as its 
brilliant side ; and if the perfection of its sci- 
ence, the delicacy of its taste, and the refine- 
ment of its arts, furnish a plausible, and, in a 
certain degree, a just ground for representing 
democratic institutions as the greatest stimu- 
lant to the human mind, the brevity of its ex- 
istence, the injustice of its decisions, the insta- 
bility of its councils, and the cruelty of its de- 
crees, afford too fair a reason for doubting the 
wisdom of imitating, on a larger scale, any of 
its institutions. Its rise was rapid and glori- 
ous ; but the era of its prosperity was brief; 
and it sunk, after a short space of existence, 
into an obscure, and, politically speaking, in- 
significant old age. The sway of the multitude, 
who formed the council of last resort in the 
commonwealth, was capricious and tyrannical; 
and such as thoroughly disgusted all the states 
in the confederacy of which it was the head. 
There was the secret of its weakness. Instead 
of protecting and cherishing the tributary and 
allied states, the Athenian democracy insulted 
and oppressed them, and in consequence, on 
the first serious reverse, they all revolted; and 
the fleets which had constituted their strength 
were at once ranged on the side of the enemies 
of the state. The flames of Aigospotamos con- 
sumed the Athenian navy; but that disaster, 
great as it undoubtedly was, was not greater 
than the rout of Trasymer.e, the slaughter of 
k Cannse, the irruption of the Gauls to Rome. 
But Athens had not the steady persevering rule 
of the Roman patricians ; nor the wise and 
beneficent policy of the Senate to the states and 
alliance, and thence they wanted both the 
energy requisite to rise superior to all their 
misfortunes, and the grateful feelings which. 
in moments of disaster, ranged the allied states 
in steady and durable array around them. 
During the invasion by Hannibal, which, as 
involving a civil contest between the Patricians 
and Plebeians in all the Italian cities, very 
nearly resembled the Peloponnesian war, not 
one state of any moment revolted from the 
Roman alliance till after the disaster of Cannn^ ; 
and even then it was only Capua, the rival of 
Rome, which took any vigorous part with the 
Carthagenians, and a very little effort was 
sufficient to retain the other allied cities in the 



Roman confederacy, or reclaim such as, from 
the presence of the Punic arms, had passed 
over to their enemies. Whereas, in Greece, 
on the very first reverse, the whole states and 
colonies in alliance constantly passed over to 
the Lacedemonian league ; and the growth of 
the power of Athens was repeatedly checked 
by the periodical reduction of its strength to 
the resources of its own territory. Had the 
Athenian multitude possessed the enduring 
fortitude and beneficent rule of the Roman 
aristocracy, they might, like them, have risen 
superior to every reverse, and gradually spread, 
by the willing incorporation of lesser states 
with their dominions, into a vast empire, ex- 
tending over the whole shores of the Mediter- 
ranean, and giving law, like the mighty empire 
which succeeded them, for a thousand years 
to the whole civilized world. 

Mr. Bulwer appears to be aware of the brief 
tenure of existence which Athens enjoyed; but 
he erroneously ascribes to general causes or 
inevitable necessity what in its case was the 
result merely of the fever of democratic ac- 
tivity. 

"In that restless and unpausing energy, 
which is the characteristic of an intellectual 
republic, there seems, as it were, a kind of 
destiny : a power impossible to resist urges the 
state from action to action, from progress to 
progress, with a rapidity dangerous while it 
dazzles; resembling in this the career of indi- 
viduals impelled onward, first to attain, and 
thence to preserve power, and who cannot 
struggle against the fate which necessitates 
them to soar, until, by the moral gravitation 
of human things, the point which has no beyond 
is attained; and the next effort to rise is but the 
prelude of their fall. In such states Time, in- 
deed, moves with gigantic strides ; years con- 
centrate what would be the epochs of centuries 
in the march of less popular institutions. The 
planet of their fortunes rolls with an equal 
speed through the cycle of internal civilization 
as of foreign glory. The condition of their 
brilliant life is the absence of repose. The 
accelerated circulation of the blood beautifies 
but consumes, and action itself, exhausting the 
stores of youth by its very vigour, becomes a 
mortal but divine disease." 

Now, in this eloquent passage there is an 
obvious error; and it is on this point that the 
Conservative or Constitutional principle of 
Government mainly differs from the Movement 
or Democratic. Aware of the violence of the 
fever which in Republican states exhausts the 
strength and wears out the energy of the people, 
the Conservative would not extinguish but 
regulate it; he would stop its diseased and 
feverish, to prolong and strengthen its healthy 
and vital action. He would not allow the 
youth to waste his strength and life in a brief 
period of guilty excess, or unrestrained indul- 
gence, but so chasten and moderate the fever 
of the blood as to secure for him a useful man- 
hood and a respected old age. The democrat, 
on the other hand, would plunge him at once 
into all the excesses of youth and intemperance, 
throw him into the arms of harlots and the 
orgies of drunkenness, and, amidst wine and 
women, the harp and the dance, lead him to 



232 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



poverty, sickness, and premature dissolution. 
And ancient history affords a memorable con- 
trast in this particular; for while Athens, worn 
out and exhausted by the fever of democratic 
activity, rose like a brilliant meteor only to 
fall after a life as short as that of a single 
individual, Rome, in whom this superabundant 
energy was for centuries coerced and restrained 
by the solidity of Patrician institutions and the 
steadiness of Patrician rule, continued steadily 
to rise and advance through a succession of 
ages, and at length succeeded in subjecting 
the whole civilized earth to its dominion. 

It has long been a matter of reproach to 
Athens, that she behaved with the blackest in- 
gratitude to her greatest citizens; and that 
Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon. So- 
crates, Thucydides, and a host of other iltus- 
trious men,receivedexile, confiscation, ordeath 
as the reward for the inestimable benefits they 
had conferred upon their fellow-citizens. Mr. 
Bulwer is much puzzled how to explain away 
these awkward facts; but as the banishment 
of these illustrious citizens, and the death of 
this illustrious sage, from the effects of popu- 
lar jealousy, cannot be denied, he boldly en- 
deavours to justify these atrocious acts of the 
Athenian democracy. In regard to Miltiades 
he observes : — 

"The case was simply this, — Miltiades was 
accused — whether justly or unjustly no matter 
— it was clearly as impossible not to receive 
the accusation, and to try the cause, as it 
would be for an English court of justice to 
refuse to admit a criminal action against Lord 
Grey or the Duke of Wellington. Was Mil- 
tiades guilty or not] This we cannot tell. 
We know that he was trkd according to the 
law, and that the Athenians thought him guilty, 
for they condemned him. So far this is not 
ingratitude — it is the course of law. A man 
is tried and found guilty — if past services 
and renown were to save the great from pun- 
ishment when convicted of a state offence, 
society would, perhaps, be disorganized, and 
certainly a free state would cease to exist. 
The question, therefore, shrinks to this — was 
it, or was it not ungrateful in the people to 
relax the penalty of death, legally incurred, 
and commute it to a heavy fine? I fear we 
shall find few instances of greater clemency in 
monarchies, however mild. Miltiades unhap- 
pily died. But nature slew him, not the Athe- 
nian people. And it cannot be said with 
greater justice of the Athenians, than of a 
people no less illustrious, and who are now 
their judges, that it was their custom, ' de tucr 
un Jlmiral pour enconruger lex autre?? " 

This passage affords an example of the 
determination which Mr. Bulwer generally 
evinces to justify and support the acts of his 
darling democracy, however extravagant or 
monstrous they may have been. Doubtless, 
we are not informed very specifically as to the 
nature of the evidence adduced in support of 
the charge of bribery brought against Miltiades. 
Doubtless, also, it was necessary to receive the 
charge when once preferred ; but was it neces- 
sary to convirt him, and send the hero of Mara- 
thon, the saviour of his country, into a painful 
exile, which ultimately proved his death 1 



That is the point, and, as the evidence is not 
laid before us, what right has Mr. Bulwer to 
assume that the Athenian multitude were not 
ungrateful or unjust in their decision? For 
their conduct, in this instance, they received 
the unanimous condemnation of the historian 
of antiquity, and yet Mr. Bulwer affirms that 
never was complaint more unjust. The fact 
is certain, that all the greatest benefactors of 
Athens were banished by the ostracism, or vole 
of all the citizens, though the evidence adduced 
in support of the charges is, for the most part, 
unknown ; but as these deeds were the acts of 
democratic assemblies, Mr. Bulwer, without 
any grounds for his opinion, in opposition to 
the unanimous voice of antiquity, vindicates 
and approves them. 

It is clear, from Mr. Bulwer's own admission, 
that the banishment of almost all these illus- 
trious benefactors of Athens was owing to their 
resisting democratic innovations, or striving 
to restore the constitution to the mixed condi- 
tion in which it existed previous to the great 
democratic innovations of Solon and Themis- 
tocles : but such resistance, or attempts even 
by the most constitutional means to restore, he 
seems to consider as amply sufficient to justify 
their exile ! In regard to the banishment of 
Cimon he observes : — 

" Without calling into question the integrity 
and the patriotism of Cimon, without sup- 
posing that he would have entered into any 
intrigue against the Athenian independence 
of foreign powers — a supposition his subse- 
quent conduct effectually refutes — he might, 
as a sincere and warm partisan of the nobles, 
and a resolute opposer of the popular party, 
have sought to restore at home the aristocratic 
balance of power, by whatever means his 
great rank, and influence, and connection with 
the Lacedaemonian party could afford him. 
We are told, at least, that he not only op- 
posed all the advances of the more liberal 
party — that he not only stood resolutely by the 
interests and dignities of the Areopagus, which 
had ceased to harmonize with the more modern 
institutions, but that he expressly sought to 
restore certain prerogatives which that assem- 
bly had formally lost during his foreign expe- 
ditions, and that he earnestly endeavoured to 
bring back the whole constitution to the more 
aristocratic government established by Clis- 
thenes. It is one thing to preserve, it is 
another to restore. A people may be deluded, 
under popular pretexts, out of the rights they 
have newly acquired, but they never submit 
to be openly despoiled of them. Nor can we 
call that ingratitude which is but the refusal 
to sui render to the merits of an individual the 
acquisitions of a nation. 

"All things considered, then, I believe, that 
if ever ostracism was justifiable, it was so in 
the case of Cimon — nay, it was, perhaps, 
absolutely essential to the preservation of the 
constitution. His very honesty made him re- 
solute in his attempts against that constitution. 
His talents, his rank, his fame, his services, 
only rendered those attempts more dangerous. 

"Could the reader be induced to view, with 
an examination equally dispassionate, the seve- 
ral ostracisms of Aristides and Themistocles, 



EULWER'S ATHENS. 



233 



he might see equal causes of justification, both 
in the motives and in the results. The first 
■was absolutely necessary for the defeat of the 
aristocratic party, and the removal of restric- 
tions on those energies which instantly found 
the most glorious vents for action ; the second 
was justified by a similar necessity, that pro- 
duced similar effects. To impartial eyes a 
people may be vindicated without traducing 
those whom a people are driven to oppose. 
In such august and complicated trials the ac- 
cuser and defendant may be both innocent." 

Here then is the key to the hideous ingrati- 
tude of the Athenian people to their two most 
illustrious benefactors, Aristides and Cimon. 
They obstructed the Movement Party: they held 
by the constitution, and endeavoured to bring 
back a mixed form of government. This 
heinous offence was, in the eyes of the Athe- 
nian democracy, and their apologist, Mr. Bul- 
wer, amply sufficient to justify their banish- 
ment: a proceeding, he says, which was right, 
even although they were innocent of the charges 
laid against them — as if injustice can in any 
case be vindicated by state necessity, or the 
form of government is to be approved which 
requires for its maintenance the periodical 
sacrifice of its noblest and most illustrious 
citizens ! 

In another place, Mr. Bulwer observes — 
"Themistocles was summoned to the ordeal 
of the ostracism, and condemned by the majo- 
rity of suffrages. Thus, like Aristides, not 
punished for offences, but paying the honourable 
penalty of rising by genius to that state of eminence, 
which threatens danger to the equality of republic*. 
"He departed from Athens, and chose his 
refuge at Argos, whose hatred to Sparta, his 
deadliest foe, promised him the securest pro- 
tection. 

" Death soon afterwards removed Aristides 
from all competitorship with Cimon; accord- 
ing to the most probable accounts he died at 
Athens ; and at the time of Plutarch his monu- 
ment was still to be seen at Phalerum. His 
countrymen, who, despite all plausible charges, 
were never ungrateful except where their lib- 
erties appeared imperilled, (whether rightly or 
erroneously our documents are too scanty to 
prove,) erected his monument at the public 
charge, portioned his three daughters, and 
awarded to his son Lysimachus a grant of one 
hundred minse of silver, a plantation of one 
hundred plethra of land, and a pension of four 
drachmae a day, (double the allowance of an 
Athenian ambassador.") 

There can be no doubt that the admission 
here candidly made by Mr. Bulwer is well- 
founded; and that jealousy of the eminence of 
their great national benefactors, or anxiety to 
remove aristocratic barriers to further popular 
innovations, was the real cause of that ingra- 
titude to their most illustrious benefactors, 
which has left so dark a stain on the Athenian 
character. But can it seriously be argued that 
that constitution is to be approved, and held 
up for imitation, which in this manner re- 
quires that national services should almost 
invariably be followed by confiscation and ex- 
ile; and anticipates the overthrow of the public. 
liberties from the ascendency of every illus- 
30 



trious man, if he is not speedily sent into ban- 
ishment ? Is this the boasted intelligence of 
the masses 1 Is this the wisdom which demo- 
cratic institutions bring to bear upon public 
affairs 1 Is this the reward which, by a perma- 
nent law of nature, freedom must ever provide 
for the most illustrious of its champions 1 Why 
is it necessary that great men and beneficent 
statesmen or commanders should invariably 
be exiled 1 The English constitution required 
for its continuance the exile neither of Pitt nor 
Fox, of Nelson nor Wellington. The Roman 
republic, until the fatal period when the au- 
thority of the aristocracy was overthrown by 
the growing encroachments of the plebeians, 
retained all its illustrious citizens, with a few 
well-known exceptions, in its own bosom : and 
the tomb of the Scipios still attests the num- 
ber of that heroic race, who, with the exception 
of the illustrious conqueror of Hannibal, the 
victim, like Themistocles, of democratic jea- 
lousy, were gathered to the tomb of their fa 
thers. There is no necessity in a well-regulated 
state, where the different powers are duly ba- 
lanced, of subjecting the illustrious to the os- 
tracism : good government provides against 
danger without committing injustice. 

Mr. Bulwer has candidly stated the perni- 
cious effect of those most vicious of the many 
vicious institutions of Athens — the exacting 
tribute from their conquered and allied states 
to the relief of the dominant multitude in the 
ruling city; and the fatal devolution to the 
whole citizens of the duties and responsibility 
of judicial power. On the first subject he ob- 
serves : 

"Thus at home and abroad, time and for- 
tune, the occurrence of events, and the happy 
accident of great men, not only maintained the 
present eminence of Athens, but promised, to 
ordinary foresight, a long duration of her glory 
and her power. To deeper observers, the pic- 
ture might have presented dim, but prophetic 
shadows. It was clear that the command 
Athens had obtained was utterly dispropor- 
tioned to her natural resources — that her great- 
ness was altogether artificial, and rested partly 
upon moral rather than physical causes, and 
partly upon the fears and the weakness of her 
neighbours. A sterile soil, a limited territory, 
a scanty population — all these — the drawbacks 
and disadvantages of nature — the wonderful 
energy and confident daring of a free state 
might conceal in prosperity ; but the first ca- 
lamity could not fail to expose them to jealous 
and hostile eyes. The empire delegated to the 
Athenians, they must naturally desire to retain 
and to increase; and there was every reason 
to forebode that their ambition would soon ex- 
ceed their capacities to sustain it. As the state 
become accustomed to its power, it would learn 
to abuse it. Increasing civilization, luxury, and 
art, brought with them new expenses, and 
Athens had already been permitted to indulge 
with impunity the dangerous passion of ex- 
acting tribute from her neighbours. Dependence 
upon other resources than those of the native 
population has ever been a main cause of the 
destruction of despotisms, and it cannot fail, 
sooner or later, to be equally pernicious to tha 
republics that trust to it. The resources of 
tj 2 



234 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



taxation confined to freemen and natives, are 
almost incalculable : the resources of tribute 
wrung from foreigners and dependents, are 
sternly limited and terribly precarious — they 
rot away the true spirit of industry in the 
people that demand the impost — they implant 
ineradicable hatred in the states that concede 
it." 

There can be no doubt that these observa- 
tions are well-founded ; and let us beware 
lest they become applicable to ourselves. Al- 
ready in the policy of England has been evinced 
a sufficient inclination to load colonial industry 
with oppressive duties, to the relief of the do- 
minant island, as the enormous burdens im- 
posed on West India produce, to the entire re- 
lief of the corresponding agricultural produce at 
home, sufficiently demonstrates. And if the pre- 
sent democratic ascendency in this country 
should continue unabated for any considerable 
time, we venture to prophesy, that if no other and 
more immediate cause of ruin sends the com- 
monwealth to perdition, it will infallibly see 
its colonial empire break off, and consequently 
its maritime power destroyed, by the injustice 
done to, or the burdens imposed on, its colo- 
nial possessions, by the impatient ruling mul- 
titude at home, who, in any measure calculated 
to diminish present burdens on themselves, at 
whatever cost to their colonial dependencies, 
will ever see the most expedient and popular 
course of policy.* 

The other enormous evil of the Athenian 
constitution — viz., the exercise of judicial 
powers of the highest description by a mob 
of several thousand citizens, is thus described 
by our author: 

" A yet more pernicious evil in the social 
state of the Athenians was radical in their con- 
stitution, — it was their courts of justice. Pro- 
ceeding upon a theory that must have seemed 
specious and plausible to an inexperienced and 
infant republic, Solon had laid it down as a 
principle of his code, that as all men were in- 
terested in the preservation of law, so all men 
might exert the privilege of the plaintiff and 
accuser. As society grew more complicated, 
the door was thus opened to every species of 
vexatious charge and frivolous litigation. The 
common informer became a most harassing 
and powerful personage, and made one of a 
fruitful and crowded profession: and in the 
very capital of liberty there existed the worst 
species of espionage. But justice was not 
thereby facilitated. The informer was regarded 
with universal hatred and contempt; and it is 
easy to perceive, from the writings of the 
great comic poet, that the sympathies of the 
Athenian audience were, as those of the Eng- 
lish public at this day, enlisted against the 
man who brought the inquisition of the law to 
the hearth of his neighbour. 

"Solon committed a yet more fatal and in- 
curable error when he carried the democratic 
principle into judicial tribunals. He evidently 
considered that the very strength and life of 
his constitution rested in the Heliam — a court 
the numbers and nature of which have been 
already described. Perhaps, at a time when 

* How soon lias this prophecy been accomplished ? 
Sept. 5, 1844. 



the old oligarchy w r as yet so formidable, it 
might have been difficult to secure justice to 
the poorer classes, while the judges were se- 
lected from the wealthier. But justice to all 
classes became a yet more capricious uncer- 
tainty when a court of law resembled a popu- 
lar hustings. 

"If we intrust a wide political suffrage to 
the people, the people at least hold no trust for 
others than themselves and their posterity — 
they are not responsible to the public, for they 
are the public. But in law, where there are two 
parties concerned, the plaintiff and defendant, 
the judge should not only be incorruptible, but 
strictly responsible. In Athens the people be- 
came the judge; and, in offences punishable by 
fine, were the very party interested in procuring 
condemnation ; the numbers of the jury prevent- 
ed all responsibility, excused all abuses, and 
made them susceptible of the same shameless 
excesses that characterize self-elected corpora- 
tions — from which appeal is idle, and over 
which public opinion exercises no control. 
These numerous, ignorant, and passionate as- 
semblies, were liable at all times to the heats 
of party, to the eloquence of individuals — 
to the whims, and caprices, the prejudices, the 
impatience, and the turbulence, which must 
ever be the characteristics of a multitude orally 
addressed. It was evident also that from ser- 
vice in such a court, the wealthy, the eminent, 
and the learned, with other occupation or 
amusement, would soon seek to absent them- 
selves. And the final blow to the integrity 
and respectability of the popular judicature 
was given at a later period by Pericles, when 
he instituted a salary, just sufficient to tempt 
the poor and to be disdained by the affluent, 
to every dicast or juryman in the ten ordinary 
courts. Legal science became not the pro- 
fession of the erudite and the laborious few, 
but the livelihood of the ignorant and idle mul- 
titude. The canvassing — the cajoling — the 
bribery — that resulted from this, the most 
vicious, institution of the Athenian democracy 
— are but too evident and melancholy tokens 
of the imperfection of human wisdom. Life, 
property, and character, were at the hazard of 
a popular election. These evils must have 
been long in progressive operation ; but per- 
haps they were scarcely visible till the fatal 
innovation of Pericles, and the flagrant ex- 
cesses that ensued allowed the people them- 
selves to listen to the branding and terrible 
satire upon the popular judicature, which is 
still preserved to us in the comedy of Aristo- 
phanes. 

"At the same time, certain critics and his- 
torians have widely and grossly erred in sup- 
posing that these courts of 'the sovereign 
multitude' were partial to the poor, and hostile 
to the rich. All testimony proves that the fact 
was' lamentably the reverse. The defendant 
was accustomed to engage the persons of rank 
or influence whom he might number as his 
friends, to appear in court on his behalf. And 
property was employed to procure at the bar 
of justice the suffrages it could command at a 
political election. The greatest vice of the 
democratic Helia?a was, that by a fine the 
wealthy could purchase pardon — by interest 



BULWER'S ATHENS. 



235 



the great could soften law. But the chances 
were against the poor man. To him litigation 
was indeed cheap, but justice dear. He had 
much the same inequality to struggle against 
in a suit with a powerful antagonist, that he 
would have had in contesting with him for an 
office in the administration. In all trials rest- 
ing on the voice of popular assemblies, it ever 
has been and ever will be found, that, raleris 
paribus, the aristocrat will defeat the plebeian." 

These observations are equally just and lu- 
minous ; and the concluding one in particular, 
as to the tendency of a corrupt or corruptible 
judicial multitude to decide in favour of the 
rich aristocrat in preference to the poor ple- 
beian, in an author of Mr. Bulwer's prepos- 
sessions, highly creditable. The only surpris- 
ing thing is how an author, who could see so 
clearly, and express so well, the total incapa- 
city of a multitude to exercise the functions 
of a judge, should not have perceived, that, for 
the same reason, they are disqualified from 
taking an active part to any good or useful 
purpose in the formation of laws or practical 
administration of government, except by pre- 
serving a vigilant eye on the conduct of others. 
In fact, the temptations to the poor to swerve 
from the path of rectitude, or conscience, in 
the case of government appointments or mea- 
sures, are just as much the stronger than in 
the judgment of individuals, as the subjects 
requiring investigation are more intricate or 
difficult, the objects of contention more import- 
ant and glittering, and the wealth which will 
be expended in corruption more abundant. 
And there in truth lies the eternal objection to 
democratic institutions, that, by withdrawing 
the people from their right province — that of 
the censors or controllers of government — and 
vesting in them the perilous powers of actual 
administration or direction of affairs, they ne- 
cessarily expose them to such a deluge of flat- 
tery or corruption, from the eloquent or wealthy 
candidates for power, as not merely unfits them 
for the sober or rational discharge of any pub- 
lic duties, but utterly confounds and depraves 
their moral feelings; and induces, before the 
time when it would naturally arrive, that uni- 
versal corruption of opinion which speedily 
attaches no other test to public actions but 
success, and leads men to consider the exer- 
cise of public duties as nothing but the means 
of individual elevation or aggrandizement. 

We have given some passages from Mr. 
Bulwer from which we dissent, or in the prin- 
ciples of which we differ. Let us now, in 
justice both to his principles and his powers 
of description, give a few others, in which we 
cordially concur, or for which we feel the high- 
est admiration. The first is the description of 
the memorable conduct of the Laconian go- 
vernment, upon occasion of the dreadful revolt 
of the Helots which followed the great earth- 
quake which nearly overthrew Lacedaemon, 
and rolled the rock of Mount Taygetus into the 
streets of Sparta — 

"An earthquake, unprecedented in its vio- 
lence, occurred in Sparta. In many places 
throughout Laconia, the rocky soil was rent 
asunder. From Mount Taygetus, which over- 
hung the city, and on which the women of 



Lacedaemon were wont to hold their bacchana- 
lian orgies, huge fragments rolled into the 
suburbs. The greater portion of the city was 
absolutely overthrown ; and it is said, proba- 
bly with exaggeration, that only five houses 
wholly escaped the shock. This terrible cala- 
mity did not cease suddenly as it came ; its 
concussions were repeated; it buried alike 
men and treasure: could we credit Diodorus, 
no less than twenty thousand persons perished 
in the shock. Thus depopulated, impoverished, 
and distressed, the enemies whom the cruelty 
of Sparta nursed within her bosom, resolved 
to seize the moment to execute their ven- 
geance, and consummate her destruction. Un- 
der Pausanias, we have seen before, that the 
Helots were already ripe for revolt. The death 
of that fierce conspirator checked, but did not 
crush, their designs of freedom. Now was 
the moment, when Sparta lay in ruins — 
now was the moment to realize their dreams. 
From field to field, from village to village, the 
news of the earthquake became the watchword 
of revolt. Up rose the Helots — they armed 
themselves, they poured on — a wild and gather- 
ing and relentless multitude resolved to slay, 
by the wrath of man, all whom that of nature 
had yet spared. The earthquake that levelled 
Sparta, rent her chains; nor did the shock 
create one chasm so dark and wide as that be- 
tween the master and the slave. 

" It is one of the sublimest and most awful 
spectacles in history — that city in ruins — the 
earth still trembling — the grim and dauntless 
soldiery collected amidst piles of death and 
ruin; and in such a time, and such a scene, 
the multitude sensible, not of danger, but of 
wrong, and rising, not to succour, but to re- 
venge : — all that should have disarmed a fee- 
bler enmity, giving fire to theirs ; the dreadest 
calamity their blessing — dismay their hope : it 
was as if the Great Mother herself had sum- 
moned her children to vindicate the long- 
abused, the all-inalienable heritage derived 
from her; and the stir of the angry elements 
was but the announcement of an armed and 
solemn union between Nature and the Op- 
pressed. 

" Fortunately for Sparta, the danger was not 
altogether unforeseen. After the confusion 
and horror of the earthquake, and while the 
people, dispersed, were seeking to save their 
effects, Archidamus, who, four years before, 
had succeeded to the throne of Lacedaemon, 
ordered the trumpets to sound as to arms. 
That wonderful superiority of man over mat- 
ter which habit and discipline can effect, and 
which was ever so visible amongst the Spar- 
tans, constituted .their safety at that hour. 
Forsaking the care of their property, the Spar- 
tans seized their arms, flocked around their 
king, and drew up in disciplined array. In 
her most imminent crisis, Sparta was thus 
saved. The Helots approached, wild, disor- 
derly, and tumultuous; they came intent only 
to plunder and to slay; they expected to find 
scattered and affrighted foes — they found a 
formidable army; their tyrants were still their 
lords. They saw, paused, and fled, scattering 
themselves over the country — exciting all they 
met to rebellion, and, soon, joined with the 



236 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Messenians, kindred to them by blood and an- 
cient reminiscences of heroic struggles, they 
seized that same Ithome which their hereditary 
Aristodemus had before occupied with unfor- 
gotten valour. This they fortified ; and occu- 
pying also the neighbouring lands, declared 
open war upon their lords. As the Messe- 
nians were the more worthy enemy, so the 
general insurrection is known by the name of 
the Third Messenian War." 

The incident here narrated of the King of 
Sparta, amidst the yawning of the earthquake 
and the ruin of his capital, sounding the trum- 
pets to arms, and the Lacedaemonians assem- 
bling in disciplined array around him, is one 
of the sublimest recorded in history. The 
pencil of Martin would there find a fit subject 
lor its noblest efforts. We need not wonder 
that a people, capable of such conduct in such 
a moment, and trained by discipline and habit 
to such docility in danger, should acquire and 
maintain supreme dominion in Greece. 

The next passage with which we shall gra- 
tify our readers, is an eloquent eulogium on a 
marvellous topic — the unrivalled grace and 
beauty of the Athenian edifices, erected in the 
time of Pericles. 

"Then rapidly progressed those glorious fa- 
brics which seemed, as Plutarch gracefully 
expresses it, endowed with the bloom of a 
perennial youth. Still the houses of private 
citizens remained simple and unadorned; still 
were the streets narrow and irregular; and 
even centuries afterwards, a stranger entering 
Athens would not at first have recognised the 
claims of the mistress of Grecian art. But to 
the homeliness of her common thoroughfares 
and private mansions, the magnificence of her 
public edifices now made a dazzling contrast. 
The Acropolis that towered above the homes 
and thoroughfares of men — a spot too sacred 
for human habitation — became, to use a pro- 
verbial phrase, 'a city of the gods.' The citi- 
zen was everywhere to be reminded of the 
majesty of the State — his patriotism was to 
be increased by the pride in her beauty — his 
taste to be elevated by the spectacle of her 
splendour. Thus flocked to Athens all who 
throughout Greece were eminent in art. Sculp- 
tors and architects vied with each other in 
adorning the young Empress of the Seas ; then 
rose the masterpieces of Phidias, of Callicrates, 
of Menesicles, which, even either in their 
broken remains, or in the feeble copies of imi- 
tators less inspired, still command so intense 
a wonder, and furnish models so immortal. 
And if, so to speak, their bones and relics ex- 
cite our awe and envy, as testifying of a love- 
lier and grander race, which the deluge of time 
has swept away, what, in that day, must have 
been their brilliant effect — unmutilated in their 
fair proportions — fresh in all their lineaments 
and hues? For their beauty was not limited 
to the symmetry of arch and column, nor their 
materials confined to the marbles of Pentelli- 
cus and Paros. Even the exterior of the 
temples glowed with the richest harmony of 
colours, and was decorated with the purest 
gold; an atmosphere peculiarly favourable 
both to the display and the preservation of art, 
permitted to external pediments and friezes all 



: the minuteness of ornament — all the brilliancy 
I of colours; — such as in the interior of Italian 
churches may yet be seen — vitiated, in the last, 
by a gaudy and barbarous taste. Nor did the 
Athenians spare any cost upon the works that 
were, like the tombs and tripods of their he- 
roes, to be the monuments of a nation to dis- 
tant ages, and to transmit the most irrefragable 
proof 'that the power of ancient Greece was 
not an idle legend.' The whole democracy 
were animated with the passion of Pericles; 
and when Phidias recommended marble as a 
cheaper material than ivory for the great sta- 
tue of Minerva, it was for that reason that 
ivory was preferred by the unanimous voice of 
the assemblj'. Thus, whether it were extrava- 
gance or magnificence, the blame in one case, 
the admiration in another, rests not more with 
the minister than the populace. It Avas, in- 
deed, the great characteristic of those works, 
that they were entirely the creations of the 
people : without the people, Pericles could not 
have built a temple, or engaged a sculptor. 
The miracles of that day resulted from the 
enthusiasm of a population yet young — fall of 
the first ardour for the beautiful — dedicating 
to the state, as to a mistress, the trophies ho- 
nourably won, or the treasures injuriously 
extorted — and uniting the resources of a na- 
tion with the energy of an individual, because 
the toil, the cost, were borne by those who 
succeeded to the enjoyment and arrogated the 
glory." 

This is eloquently said: but in searching 
for the causes of the Athenian supremacy in 
taste and art, especially sculpture and architec- 
ture, we suspect the historic observer must 
look for higher and more spiritual causes than 
the mere energy and feverish excitement of 
democratic institutions. For, admitting that 
energy and universal exertion are in every 
age the characteristic of republican states, how 
did it happen that, in Athens alone, it took so 
early and decidedly the direction of taste and 
art? That is the point which constitutes the 
marvel, as well as the extraordinary perfection 
which it at once acquired. Many other nations 
in ancient and modern times have been re- 
publican, — Corinth, Tyre, Carthage, Sidon, 
Sardis, Syracuse, Marseilles, Holland, Switzer- 
land, America, — but where shall we find one 
which produced the Parthenon or the Apollo 
Belvidere, the Tragedies of ^Eschylus or the 
wisdom of Socrates, the thought of Thucydides 
or the visions of Plato ? How has it happened 
that those democratic institutions, which in 
modern times are found to be generally as- 
sociated only with vulgar manners, urban dis- 
cord, or commercial desires, should there have 
elevated the nation in a few years to the high- 
est pinnacle of intellectual glory — that, instead 
of Dutch ponderosity, or Swiss slowness, of 
American ambition, or Florentine discord, re- 
publicanism on the shores of Attica produced 
the fire of Demosthenes, the grace of Euripides, 
the narrative of Xenophon, the taste of Phidias ? 
After the most attentive consideration, we find 
it impossible to explain this marvel of marvels 
by the agency merely of human causes ; and 
are constrained to ascribe the placing of the 
eye of Greece on the shores of Attica to the 



BULWER'S ATHENS. 



237 



same invisible hand which has fixed the won- 
ders of vision in the human forehead. There 
are certain starts in human progress, and more 
especially in the advance of art, which it is 
utterly hopeless to refer to any other cause but 
the immediate design and agency of the Al- 
mighty. Democratic institutions afford no sort 
of explanation of them : we see no Parthenon s, 
nor Sophocles, nor Platos in embryo, either in 
America since its independence, or France 
during the Revolution, nor England since the 
passing of the Reform Bill. When we reflect 
that taste, in Athens, in thirty years after the 
Persian invasion, had risen up from the in- 
fantine rudeness of the iEgina Marbles to the 
faultless peristyle and matchless sculpture of 
the Parthenon; that in modern Italy, the art of 
painting rose in the lifetime of a single in- 
dividual, who died at the age of thirty-eight, 
from the stiff outline and hard colouring of 
Pietro Perrugino to the exquisite grace of 
Raphael: and that it was during an age when 
the barons to the north of the Alps could nei- 
ther read nor write, and when rushes were 
strewed on the floors instead of carpets, that 
the unrivalled sublimity of Gothic Cathedrals 
was conceived, and the hitherto unequalled 
skill of their structure attained : we are con- 
strained to admit that a greater power than 
that of man superintends human affairs, and 
that, from the rudest and most unpromising 
materials, Providence can, at the appointed 
season, bring forth the greatest and most ex- 
alted efforts of human intellect. 

As a favourable specimen of our author's 
powers of military description, no unimport- 
ant quality in an historian, we shall gratify our 
readers by his account of the battle of Platea; 
the most vital conflict to the fortunes of the 
species which occurred in all antiquity, and 
which we have never elsewhere read in so 
graphic and animated a form — 

'•As the troops of Mardonius advanced, the 
rest of the Persian armament, deeming the 
task was now not to fight but to pursue, raised 
their standards and poured forward tumultu- 
ously, without discipline or order. 

" Pausanias, pressed by the Persian line, 
and if not of a timorous, at least of an irre- 
solute, temper, lost no time in sending to the 
Athenians for succour. But when the latter 
were on their march with the required aid, 
they were suddenly intercepted by the auxiliary 
Greeks in the Persian service, and cut off from 
the rescue of the Spartans. 

"The Spartans beheld themselves thus left 
unsupported, with considerable alarm. Yet 
their force, including the Tegeans and Helots, 
was fifty-three thousand men. Committing 
himself to the gods, Pausanias ordained a 
solemn sacrifice, his whole army awaiting the 
result, while the shafts of the Persian bowmen 
poured on them near and fast. But the entrails 
presented discouraging omens, and the sacri- 
fice was again renewed. Meanwhile the Spar- 
tans evinced their characteristic furtitude and 
discipline — not one man stirring from his 
ranks until the auguries should assume a 
more favouring aspect; all harassed, and 
6ome wounded, by the Persian arrows, they 
yet, seeking protection only beneath their broad 



bucklers, waited with a stern patience the 
time of their leader and of Heaven. Then fell 
Callicrates, the stateliest and strongest soldier 
in the whole army, lamenting, not death, but 
that his sword was as yet undrawn against 
the invader. 

"And still sacrifice after sacrifice seemed to 
forbid the battle, when Pausanias, lifting his 
eyes that streamed with tears, to the temple 
of Juno, that stood hard by, supplicated the 
tutelary goddess of Cithceron, that if the fates 
forbade the Greeks to conquer, they might at 
least fall like warriors. And while uttering 
this prayer, the tokens waited for became 
suddenly visible in the victims, and the augurs 
announced the promise of coming victory. 

"Therewith, the order of battle rang instant- 
ly through the army, and, to use the poetical 
comparison of Plutarch, the Spartan phalanx 
suddenly stood forth in its strength, like some 
fierce animal — erecting its bristles and pre- 
paring its vengeance for the foe. The ground 
broken in many steep and precipitous ridges, 
and intersected by the Asopus, whose sluggish 
stream winds over a broad and rushy bed, was 
unfavourable to the movements of cavalry, 
and the Persian foot advanced therefore on 
the Greeks. 

"Drawn up in their massive phalanx, the 
Lacedaemonians presented an almost impene- 
trable body — sweeping slowly on, compact and 
serried — while the hot and undisciplined va- 
lour of the Persians, more fortunate in the 
skirmish than the battle, broke itself in a 
thousand waves upon that moving rock. Pour- 
ing on in small numbers at a time, they fell 
fast round the progress of the Greeks — their 
armour slight against the strong pikes of 
Sparta — their courage without skill — their 
numbers without discipline; still they fought 
gallantly, even when on the ground seizing 
the pikes with their naked hands, and with the 
wonderful agility which still characterizes the 
Oriental swordsmen, springing to their feet, 
and regaining their arms, when seemingly over- 
come; wresting away their enemy's shields, and 
grappling with them desperately hand to hand. 

" Foremost of a band of a thousand chosen 
Persians, conspicuous by his white charger, 
and still more by his daring valour, rode Mar- 
donius, directing the attack — fiercer wherever 
his armour blazed. Inspired by his presence, 
the Persians fought worthily of their warlike 
fame, and, even in falling, thinned the Spartan 
ranks. At length the rash but gallant leader 
of the Asiatic armies received a mortal wound 
— his skull was crushed, in by a stone from the 
hand of a Spartan. His chosen band, the boast 
of the army, fell fighting round him, but his 
death was the general signal of defeat and flight. 
Encumbered by their long robes, and pressed 
by the relentless conquerors, the Persians fled 
in disorder towards their camp, which was 
secured by wooden entrenchments, by gates, 
and towers and walls. Here, fortifying them- 
selves as they best might, they contended suc- 
cessfully, and with advantage, against the 
Lacedaimonians, who were ill skilled in assault 
and siege. 

"Meanwhile, the Athenians obtained the 
victory on the plains over the Greeks of Mar- 



238 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



donius — finding their most resolute enemy in 
the Thebans — (three hundred of whose princi- 
pal warriors fell in the field) — and now joined 
the Spartans at the Persian camp. The Athe- 
nians are said to have been better skilled in 
the art of siege than the Spartans; yet at that 
time their experience could scarcely have been 
greater. The Athenians were at all times, 
however, of a more impetuous temper; and 
the men who had ' run to the charge' at Mar- 
athon, were not to be baffled by the desperate 
remnant of their ancient foe. They scaled the 
walls — they effected a breach through which 
the Tegeans were the first to rush — the Greeks 
poured fastand fierce into the camp. Appalled, 
dismayed, stupified, by the suddenness and 
greatness of their loss, the Persians no longer 
sustained their fame — they dispersed them- 
selves in all directions, falling, as they lied, 
with a prodigious slaughter, so that out of that 
mighty armament scarce three thousand effect- 
ed an escape." 

Our limits will admit of only one extract 
more, but it is on a different subject, and ex- 
hibits Mr. Iiulwer's powers of criticism in the 
fields of poetry and romance, with which he 
has long been familiar: — 

" Summoning before us the eternal character 
of the Athenian drama, the vast audience, the 
unroofed and enormous theatre, the actors 
themselves enlarged by art above the ordinary 
proportions of men, the solemn and sacred 
subjects from which its form and spirit were 
derived, we turn to iEschylus, and behold at 
once the fitting creator of its grand and ideal 
personifications. I have said that Homer was 
his original; but a more intellectual age than 
that of the Grecian epic had arrived, and with 
jEschylus, philosophy passed into poetry. 
The dark doctrine of Fatality imparted its 
stern and awful interest to the narration of 
events — men were delineated, not as mere self- 
acting and self-willed mortals, but as the agents 
of a destiny inevitable and unseen — the gods 
themselves are no longer the gods of Homer, 
entering into the sphere of human action for 
petty motives, and for individual purposes — 
drawing their grandeur, not from the part they 
perform, but from the descriptions of the poet; 
— they appear now as the oracles or the agents 
of fate — they are visitors from another world, 
terrible and ominous from the warnings which 
they convey. Homer is the creator of the ma- 
terial poetry, iEschylus of the intellectual. 
The corporeal and animal sufferings of the 
Titan in the epic hell become exalted by tragedy 
into the portrait of moral fortitude defying 
physical anguish. The Prometheus of iEschy- 
lus is the spirit of a god disdainfully subjected 
to the misfortunes of a man. In reading this 
wonderful performance, which in pure and 
sustained sublimity is perhaps unrivalled in 
the literature of the world, we lose sight 
entirely of the cheerful Hellenic worship ; and 
yet it is in vain that the learned attempt to 
trace its vague and mysterious metaphysics to 
any old symbolical religion of the east. More 
probably, whatever theological system it 
shadows forth, was rather the gigantic con- 
ception of the poet himself, than the imperfect 
revival of any forgotten creed, or the poetical 



disguise of any existent philosophy. How- 
ever this be, it would certainly seem, that in 
this majestic picture of the dauntless enemy 
of Jupiter, punished only for his benefits to 
man, and attracting all our sympathies by his 
courage and his benevolence, is conveyed 
something of disbelief or defiance of the creed 
of the populace — a suspicion from which 
^Eschylus was not free in the judgment of his 
contemporaries, and which is by no means in- 
consonant with the doctrines of Pythagoras." 

Mr. Bulwer justifies this warm eulogium by 
some beautiful translations. We select his 
animated version of the exquisite passage so 
well known to scholars, where Clytemnestra de- 
scribes to the chorus the progress of the watch- 
fires which announced to expecting Greece the 
fall of Troy — a passage perhaps unrivalled in 
the classical authors in picturesque and vivid 
images, and which approaches more nearly, 
though it has surpassed in sublimity, Sir Wal- 
ter Scott's description of the bale-fires which 
announced to the Lothians a warden inroad of 
the English forces : — 

" A gleam — a glpam — from Ida's height, 

By the Fire-god sent, it came ; — 
From watch to watch it leapt that light, 

Asa rider rode the Flame ! 
It shot through the startled sky, 

And the torch of that blazing glory 
Old Lemnos caught on high, 

On its holy promontory. 
And s«nt it on, the jocund sisn. 
To Athos, Mount of Jove divine. 

Wildly the while, it rose from the isle. 
So that the might of the journeying light 

Skimmed over the hack of the gleaming brine 
Farther and faster speeds it on, 

Till the watch that keep Macistus steep- 
See it burst like a blazing sun ! 
Doth Macistus sleep 
On his tower-clad steep 1 ? 
No! rapid and red doth the wild fire sweep ; 

It flashes afar, on the wayward stream 

Of the wild Euripus, the rushing beam ! 
It rouses the light on Messapion's height, 
And they feed its breath with the withered heath. 
But it may not stay ! 
And away— away— 
It bounds in its freshening might. 

Silent and soon, 

Like a broadened moon, 

It passes in sheen, Asopus green, 
And hursts on Cithaeron gray! 

The warder wakes to the signal-rays, 

And it swoops from the hill with a broader blaze. 
On — on the fiery glory rode — 
Thy lonely lake, Gorgopis, glowed — 
To Megara's mount it came ; 
They feed it again, 
And it streams amain — 

A giant beard of flame ! 
The headland cliffs that darkly down 
O'er the Saronic waters frown, 
Are pass'd with the swift one's lurid stride, 
And the huce rock glares on the glaring tide, 
With mightier march and fiercer power 
It gained Arachne's neighbouring tower — 
Thence on our Arsive roof its rest it won, 
Of Ida's fire the long-descended Son ! 

Bright harbinger of glory and of joy ! 
So first and last with equal honour crown'd, 
In solemn feasts the race-torch circles round. — 
And these my heralds !— this my Sign of Peace; 
Lo ! while we breathe, the victor lords of Greece, 

Stalk, in stern tumult, through the halls of Troy." 

We have now discharged the pleasing duty 
of quoting some of the gems, and pointing out 
some of the merits of th s remarkable work. 
It remains with equal impartiality, and in no 
unfriendly spirit, to glance at some of its faults 
— faults which, we fear, will permanently pre- 
vent it from taking the place to which it is en- 



BULWER'S ATHENS. 



239 



titled, from its brilliancy and research, in the 
archives of literature. 

The first of these defects is the constant 
effort which is made to justify the proceedings, 
and extenuate the faults, and magnify the 
merits of democratic societies ; and the equally 
uniform attempt to underrate the value of 
aristocratic institutions, and blacken the pro- 
ceedings of aristocratic states. This, as 
Fouche would say, is worse than an offence — 
it is a fault. Its unfairness and absurdity is 
so obvious, that it neutralizes and obliterates 
the effect which otherwise might be produced 
by the brilliant picture which Mr. Bulwer's 
transcendent subject, as well as his own re- 
markable powers of narrative and description, 
afford. By the common calculation of chances, 
it is impossible to suppose that the aristocra- 
cies are always in the wrong, and the demo- 
cracies always in the right ; that the former 
are for ever actuated by selfish, corrupt, and 
discreditable motives, and the latter everlast- 
ingly influenced by generous, ennobling, and 
upright feelings. We may predicate with per- 
fect certainty of any author, be he aristocratic, 
monarchical, or republican, who indulges in 
such a strain of thought and expression, ex- 
travagant eulogiums from his own party in 
the outset, and possibly undeserved but certain 
neglect from posterity in the end. Mankind, 
in future times, when present objects and party 
excitement have ceased, will never read — or, 
at least, never attach faith to — any works 
which place all the praise on the one side and 
all the blame to the other of any of the child- 
ren of Adam. Rely upon it, virtue and vice 
are very equally divided in the world: praise 
and blame require to be very equally bestowed. 
Different institutions produce a widely different 
effect upon society and the progress of human 
affairs : but it is not because the one makes 
all men good, the other all men bad; but be- 
cause the one permits the bad or selfish quali- 
ties of one class to exercise an unrestrained 
influence — the other, because it arrays against 
their excesses the bad or selfish qualities of 
the other classes. All theories of government 
founded upon the virtue of mankind or the per- 
fectability of human nature, will, to the end of 
the world, be disproved by the experience, and 
discarded by the common sense of mankind. 
Mother Eve has proved, and will prove, more 
than a match for the strongest of her descend- 
ants. Instability, selfishness, folly, ambition, 
rapacity, ever have and ever will characterize 
alike democratic and aristocratic societies and 
governors. The wisdom of government and 
political philosophy consists not in expecting 
or calculating on impossibilities from a cor- 
rupted being, but in so arranging society and 
political powers that the selfishness and ra- 
pacity of the opposite classes of which it is 
composed may counteract each other. 

The second glaring defect is the asperity 
and bitterness with which the author speaks 
of those who differ from him in political opi- 
nion. He in an especial manner is unceasing 
in his attacks upon Mr. Mitford : the historian 
whose able researches have added so much to 
our correct information on the state of the 
Grecian commonwealth. Here, too, is more 



than an impropriety — there is a fault. By dis- 
playing such extraordinary bitterness on the 
subject, Mr. Bulwer clearly shows that he feels 
the weight of the Mitford fire ; the strokes de- 
livered have been so heavy that they have 
been felt. Nothing could be more impolitic 
than this, even for the interests of the party 
which he supports. It is not by perpetually 
attacking an author on trifling points or minor 
inaccuracies that you are to deaden or neutra- 
lize the impression he has made on mankind : 
it is by stating facts, and adducing arguments 
inconsistent with his opinions. The maxim, 
" urs est eclare artem," nowhere applies more 
clearly than here : Lingard is the model of a 
skilful controversialist, whose whole work, 
sedulously devoted to the upholding of the 
Catholic cause through the whole history of 
England, hardly contains a single angry or en- 
venomed passage against a protestant histori- 
an. Mr. Bulwer would be much the better of 
the habits of the bar, before he ventured into 
the arena of political conflict. It is not by his 
waspish notes that the vast influence of Mit- 
ford's Greece on public thought is to be obvi- 
ated: their only effect is to diminish the force 
of his attempted and otherwise able refutation. 
The future historian, who is to demolish the 
influence of Colonel Napier's eloquent and 
able, but prejudiced and, in political affairs, 
partial h'istory of the Peninsular war, will 
hardly once mention his name. 

The last and by far the most serious objec- 
tion to Mr. Bulwer's work is the complete 
oblivion which it evinces of a superintending 
Providence, either in dealing out impartial 
retribution to public actions, whether by na- 
tions or individuals in this world, or in deduc- 
ing from the agency of human virtue or vice, 
and the shock of conflicting passions, the 
means of progressive improvement. We do 
not say that Mr. Bulwer is irreligious ; far 
from it. From the brightness of his genius, 
as well as many exquisite passages in his 
novels, we should infer the reverse, and we 
hope yet to see his great powers exerted in 
the noblest of labours, that of tracing the wis- 
dom of Providence amidst the mighty maze 
of human events. We say only that he as- 
cribes no influence in human affairs to a su- 
perintending agency. This is being behind 
the age. It is lagging in arrear of his com- 
peers. The vast changes consequent on the 
French Revolution have blown the antiquated 
oblivion of Providence in Raynal or Voltaire 
out of the water. The convulsions they had 
so large a share in creating have completely 
set at rest their irreligious dogmas. Here, 
too, Mr. Bulwer has fallen into an imprudence, 
for his own sake, as much as an error. If he 
will take the trouble to examine the works 
which are rising into durable celebrity in this 
country, those which are to form the ideas of 
la jcune Anghterre, he will find them all, with- 
out being fanatical, religious in their tendency. 
For obvious reasons we do not give the names 
of living authors ; but we admire Mr. Bulwer's 
talents: we would fain, for the sake of the public, 
see them enlisted in the Holy Alliance — for the 
sake of himself, fall in more with the rising jpi 
rit of the age ; and we give a word to the wise 



240 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



As an example of the defect of which we 
complain, and to avoid the suspicion of injus- 
tice in the estimate we have formed of the 
tendency in this particular of his writings, we 
shall give an extract. Perhaps there is no 
event in the history of the world which has 
been so momentous in its consequences, so 
vital in its effects, as the repulse of the Per- 
sian invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and none 
in which the superintending agency of an 
overruling Providence was so clearly evinced. 
Observe the reflections which Mr. Bulwer de- 
duces from this memorable event. 

" When the deluge of the Persian arms rolled 
back to its eastern bed, and the world was once 
more comparatively at rest, the continent of 
Greece rose visibly and majestically above the 
rest of the civilized earth. Afar in the Latian 
plains, the infant state of Rome was silently 
and obscurely struggling into strength against 
the neighbouring and petty states in which the 
old Etrurian civilization was rapidly passing 
to decay. The genius of Gaul and Germany, 
yet unredeemed from barbarism, lay scarce 
known, save where colonized by Greeks, in the 
gloom of its woods and wastes. The pride of 
Carthage had been broken by a signal defeat 
in Sicilv; and Gelo, the able and astute tyrant 
of Syracuse, maintained, in a Grecian colony, 
the splendour of the Grecian name. 

"The ambition of Persia, still the' great mo- 
narchy of the world, was permanently checked 
and crippled ; the strength of generations had 
been wasted, and the immense extent of the 
empire only served yet more to sustain the 
general peace, from the exhaustion of its 
forces. The defeat of Xerxes paralyzed the 
East. 

" Thus, Greece was left secure, and at liberty 
to enjoy the tranquillity it had acquired, and 
to direct to the arts of peace the novel and 
amazing energies which had been prompted 
by the dangers, and exalted by the victories, 
of war. 

"The Athenians, now returned to their city, 
saw before them the arduous task of rebuild- 
ing its ruins, and restoring its wasted lands. 
The vicissitudes of the war had produced many 
silent and internal, as well as exterior, changes. 
Many great fortunes had been broken ; and the 
ancient spirit of the aristocracy had received 
no inconsiderable shock in the power of new 
families; the fame of the base-born and demo- 
cratic Themistocles — and the victories which 
a whole people had participated — broke up 
much of the prescriptive and venerable sanc- 
tity attached to ancestral names, and to parti- 
cular families. This was salutary to the spirit 
of enterprise in all classes. The ambition of 
the great was excited to restore, by some active 
means, their broken fortunes and decaying in- 
fluence — the energies of the humbler ranks, 
already aroused by their new importance, were 
stimulated to maintain and to increase it. It 
was the very crisis in which a new direction 
might be given to the habits and the character 
of a whole people; and to seize all the advan- 
tages of that crisis, Fate, in Themistocles, had 
Rllotted to Athens, a man whose qualities were 



not only pre-eminently great in themselves, but 
peculiarly adapted to the circumstances of the 
time. And, as I have elsewhere remarked, it 
is indeed the nature and prerogative of free 
states, to concentrate the popular will into 
something of the unity of despotism, by pro- 
ducing, one after another, a series of repre- 
sentatives of the wants and exigencies of The 
Hour — each leading his generation, but only 
while he sympathizes with its will ; — and either 
baffling or succeeded by his rivals, not in pro- 
portion as he excels or he is outshone in ge- 
nius, but as he gives, or ceases to give, to the 
widest range of the legislative power, the most 
concentrated force of the executive ; thus unit- 
ing the desires of the greatest number, under 
the administration of the narrowest possible 
control; — the constitution popular — the go- 
vernment absolute but responsible." 

Now, in this splendid passage is to be seen 
a luminous specimen of the view taken of the 
most memorable events in history by the libe- 
ral writers. In his reflections on this heart- 
stirring event, in his observations on the 
glorious defeat of the arms of Eastern despot- 
ism by the infant efforts of European freedom, 
there is nothing said of the incalculable con- 
sequences dependent on the struggle — nothing 
on the evident protection afforded by a super- 
intending Providence to the arms of an incon- 
siderable Republic — nothing on the marvellous 
adaptation of the character of Themistocles to 
the mighty duty with which he was charged, 
that of rolling back from the cradle of civil- 
ization, freedom and knowledge, the wave of 
barbaric conquests. It was fate which raised 
him up! Against such a view of human af- 
fairs we enter our solemn protest. We allow 
nothing to fate, unless that is meant as another 
way of expressing the decrees of an overrul- 
ing, all-seeing, and beneficent intelligence. 
We see in the defeat of the mighty armament 
by the arms of a small city on the Attic shore 
— in the character of its leaders — in the efforts 
which it made — in the triumphs which it 
achieved, and the glories which it won — the 
clearest evidence of the agency of a superin- 
tending power, which elicited, from the collision 
of Asiatic ambition with European freedom, 
the wonders of Grecian civilization, and the 
marvels of Athenian genius. And it is just 
because we are fully alive to the important 
agency of the democratic element in this me- 
morable conflict ; because we see clearly what 
inestimable blessings, when duly restrained, it 
is capable of bestowing on mankind ; because 
we trace in its energy in every succeediug 
age the expansive force which has driven the 
blessings of civilization into the recesses of 
the earth, that we are the determined enemies 
of those democratic concessions which entire- 
ly destroy the beneficent agency of this power- 
ful element, which permit the vital heat of 
society to burst forth in ruinous explosions, or 
tear to atoms the necessary superincumbent 
masses, and instead of the smiling aspect of 
early and cherished vegetation, leave only in 
its traces the blackness of desolation and the 
ruin of nature. 



THE REIGN OF TERROR. 



211 



THE REIGN OF TERROR.* 



The French Revolution is a subject on which 
neither history nor public opinion have been 
able as yet to pronounce an impartial verdict; 
nor is it perhaps possible that the opinions of 
mankind should ever be unanimous, upon the 
varied events which marked its course. The 
passions excited were so fierce, the dangers 
incurred so tremendous, the sacrifices made 
so great, that the judgment not only of con- 
temporary but of future generations must be 
warped in forming an opinion concerning it; 
and as long as men are divided into liberal and 
conservative parties, so long will they be at 
variance in the views they entertain in regard 
to the great strife which they first maintained 
against each other. 

There are some of the great events of this 
terrible drama, however, concerning which 
there appears now to be scarcely any discre- 
pancy of opinion. The execution of the king 
and the royal family — the massacre of the 
Girondists — the slaughter in the prisons, are 
generally admitted to have been, using Fouche's 
words, not only crimes but faults; great errors 
in policy, as well as outrageous violations of 
the principles of humanity. These cruel and 
unprecedented actions, by drawing the sword 
and throwing away the scabbard, are allowed 
to have dyed with unnecessary blood the 
career of the Revolution; to have needlessly 
exasperated parties against each other; and 
by placing the leaders of the movement in the 
terrible alternative of victory or death, rendered 
their subsequent career one incessant scene 
of crime and butchery. With the exception of 
Levasseur de la Sarthe, the most sturdy and 
envenomed of the republican writers, there is 
no author with whom we are acquainted, who 
now openly defends these atrocities ; who pre- 
tends, in Barrere's words, that " the tree of 
liberty cannot flourish unless it is watered by 
the blood of kings and aristocrats ;" or seriously 
argues that the regeneration of society must 
be preceded by the massacre of the innocent 
and the tears of the orphan. 

But although the minds of men are nearly 
agreed on the true character of these sangui- 
nary proceedings, there is a great diversity of 
opinion as to the necessity under which the 
revolutionists acted, and the effects with which 
they were attended on the progress of freedom. 
The royalists maintain that the measures of 
the Convention were as unnecessary as they 
were atrocious ; that they plunged the progress 
of social amelioration into an ocean of blood; 
devastated France for years with fire and 
sword ; brought to an untimely end above a 
million of men; and finally riveted about the 
neck of the nation an iron despotism, as the 
inevitable result and merited punishment of 
such criminal excesses. The revolutionists, 



* Histoire de la Convention National?. Tar M. I,—, 
Conventionel. Paris, 1833. Foreign Quarterly Review, 
No. XXV., February, 1831. 
31 



on the other hand, allege that these severities, 
however much to be deplored, were unavoid- 
able in the peculiar circumstances in which 
France was then placed: they contend that the 
obstinate resistance of the privileged classes to 
all attempts at pacific amelioration, their im- 
placable resentment for the deprivation of their 
privileges, and their recourse to foreign bayo- 
nets to aid in their recovery, left to their an- 
tagonists no alternative but their extirpation ; 
that in this " mortal strife " the royalists showed 
themselves as unscrupulous in their means, 
and would, had they triumphed, been as un- 
sparing in their vengeance, as their adver- 
saries ; and they maintain, that notwithstanding 
all the disasters with which it has been at- 
tended, the triumph of the Revolution has pro- 
digiously increased the productive powers and 
public happiness of France, and poured a flood 
of youthful blood into her veins. 

The historians of the Revolution, as might 
have been expected, incline to one or other of 
these two parties. Of these the latest and most 
distinguished are Bertrand de Molleville and 
Lacretelle on the royalist side, and Mignetand 
Thiers on that of the Revolution, the reputation 
of whose works is now too well established to 
require us to enter here into an appreciation 
of their merits or defects, or to be affected by 
our praise or our censure. The work now 
before us, which is confined to the most stormy 
and stirring period of the Revolution, does not 
aspire, by its form, to a rivalry with all or any 
of those we have just mentioned. It consists 
of a series of graphic sketches of the National 
Convention, drawn evidently by one well ac- 
quainted with the actors in its terrific annals, 
and interspersed with a narrative composed at 
a subsequent period, with the aids which the 
memoirs and historians of later times afford. 
As such, it possesses a degree of interest equal 
to any work on the same subject with which 
we are acquainted. Not only the speeches, but 
the attitudes, the manner, the appearance, and 
very dress of the actors in the drama are 
brought before our eyes. The author seems, 
in general, to speak in the delineation of cha- 
racter from his own recollections ; the speeches 
which he has reported are chiefly transcribed 
from the columns of the Moniteur; but in some 
instances, especially the conversations of 
Danton, Robespierre, Barrere, and the other 
leaders of the Jacobins, we suspect that he has 
mingled his historical reminiscences with sub- 
sequent acquisitions, and put into the mouths 
of the leading characters of the day, prophecies 
too accurate in their fulfilment to have been 
the product of human sagacity. Generally 
speaking, however, the work bears the impress 
of intimate acquaintance with the events and 
persons who are described ; and although trom 
being published without a name, it has not the 
guarantee for its authenticity which known 
character and respectability afford, yet, in so 
far as internal evidence is concerned, we are 



242 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



inclined to rank it with the most faithful nar- 
ratives of the events it records which have 
issued from the press. Its general accuracy, 
we are enabled, from a pretty extensive com- 
parison of the latest authorities, to confirm. 
We shall give some extracts, which, if we are 
not greatly mistaken, will justify the tone of 
commendation in which we have spoken of it. 

The period at which the work commences 
is the opening of the Convention, immediately 
after the revolt on the 10th of August had over- 
turned the throne, and when a legislature, 
elected by almost universal suffrage, in a state 
of unprecedented exasperation, was assembled 
to regenerate the state. 

Robespierre and Marat, the Agamemnon 
and Ajax of the democracy, are thus ably 
sketched : 

" Robespierre and Marat — enemies in secret, 
to external appearance friends — were early 
distinguished in the Convention ; both dear to 
the mob, but with different shades of character. 
The latter paid his court to the lowest of the 
low, to the men of straw or in rags, who were 
then of so much weight in the political sys- 
tem. The needy, the thieves, the cut-throats — 
in a word, the dregs of the people, the caput 
nwrtuum of the human race, to a man supported 
Marat. 

" Robespierre, albeit dependent on the same 
class to which his rival was assimilated by his 
ugliness, his filth, his vulgar manners, and 
disgusting habits, was nevertheless allied to a 
more elevated division of it: to the shopkeep- 
ers and scribes, small traders, and the inferior 
rank of lawyers. These admired in him the 
politesse bourgeoise ; his well-combed and pow- 
dered head, the richness of his waistcoats, the 
whiteness of his linen, the elegant cut of his 
coats, his breeches, silk stockings carefully 
drawn on, bright knee and shoe buckles ; every 
thing, in short, bespoke the gentlemanly preten- 
sions of Robespierre, in opposition to the sans- 
culottism of Marat. 

"The shopkeepers and the lower ranks of 
the legal profession never identify themselves 
with the populace, even during the fervour of 
a revolution. There is in them an innate 
spirit of feudality, which leads them to despise 
the canaille and envy the noblesse : they de- 
sire equality, but only with such as are above 
themselves, not such as would confound them 
with their workmen. The latter class is 
•odious to them ; they envy the great, but they 
have a perfect horror for those to whom they 
give employment; never perceiving that the 
democratic principle can admit of no such 
distinction. This is the reason which made 
the aristocralie bourgeoise prefer Robespierre ; 
they thought they saw in his manners, his 
dress, his air, a certain pledge that he would 
never degrade them to the multitude; never 
associate them with those whose trade was 
carried on in the mud, like Marat's supporters. 
Amidst these divisions, one fixed idea alone 
■united these opposite leaders ; and that was, 
to give such a pledge to the Revolution, as 
would render it impossible to doubt their sin- 
cerity, and that pledge was to be the blood of 
•Louis XVI."— Vol. i. p. 28. 



Roland and his wife, the beautiful victim of 
Jacobin vengeance, are thus portrayed : 

" Roland was a man of ordinary capacity, 
but he obtained the reputation of genius by 
means of his wife, who thought, wrote, and 
spoke for him. She was a woman of a most 
superior mind; with as much virtue as pride, 
as much ambition as domestic virtue. Daugh- 
ter of an engraver, she commenced her career 
by wishing to contend with a queen ; and no 
sooner had Marie Antoinette fallen, than she 
seemed resolute to maintain the combat, no 
longer against a person of her own sex, but 
with the men who pretended to rival the repu- 
tation of her husband. 

" Madame Roland had great talent, but she 
wanted tact and moderation. She belonged to 
that class in the middling ranks that scarcely 
knows what good breeding is; her manners 
were too brusque; she trusted implicitly to 
her good intentions, and was quite indifferent 
in regard to external appearances, which, after 
all, are almost every thing in this world. Like 
Marie Antoinette, she was master in her own 
family ; the former was king, the latter was 
minister; her husband, whom she constantly 
put forward, as often disappeared in her pre- 
sence, which gave rise to the bon mot of Con- 
dorcet: 'When I wish to see the minister of 
the interior, I never can see any thing but the 
petticoat of his wife.' This was strictly true: 
persons on business uniformly applied to Ma- 
dame Roland instead of the minister; and 
whatever she may have said in her memoirs, 
it is certain that unconsciously she opened the 
portfolio with her own hand. She was to the 
last degree impatient under the attacks of the 
tribune, to which she had no means of reply, 
and took her revenge by means of pamphlets 
and articles in the public journals. In these 
she kept up an incessant warfare, which Ro- 
land sanctioned with his name, but in which 
it was easy to discover the warm and brilliant 
style of his wife." — i. 38. 

These observations exhibit a fair specimen 
of the author's manner. It is nervous, brief, 
and sententious, rather than eloquent or impres- 
sive. The work is calculated to dispel many 
illusions under which we, living at this dis- 
tance, labour, in regard to the characters of the 
Revolution. They are here exhibited in their 
genuine colours, alike free from the dark shades 
in which they have been enveloped by one party, 
and the brilliant hues in which they are array- 
ed by the other. In the descriptions, we see 
the real springs of human conduct on this ele- 
vated stage ; the same littlenesses, jealousies, 
and weaknesses which are every day conspi- 
cuous around us in private life. 

The Girondists in particular are stripped of 
their magic halo by his caustic hand. He dis- 
plays in a clear light the weakness as well as 
brilliant qualities of that celebrated party : 
their ambition, intrigues, mob adulation, when 
rising with the Revolution ; their weakness, 
irresolution, timidity, when assailed by its fury. 
Their character is summed up in the following 
words, which are put into the mouth of Lan- 
juinais, one of the most intrepid and noble- 
minded of the moderate party. 



THE REIGN OF TERROR. 



243 



" The Girondists are in my mind a living 
example of the truth of the maxim of Beaumar- 
chais: 'My God! what idiots these men of 
talent are !' All their speeches delivered at 
our tribune are sublime; their actions are in- 
explicable on any principles of common sense. 
They amuse themselves by exhausting their 
popularity in insignificant attacks, and waste 
it by that means in such a manner that already 
it is almost annihilated. They destroyed them- 
selves when they overturned the monarchy ; 
they flattered themselves that they would reign 
afterwards by their virtue and their brilliant 
qualities, little foreseeing how soon the Jaco- 
bins would mount on their shoulders. At pre- 
sent, to maintain themselves in an equivocal 
position, they will consent to the trial of the 
king, flattering themselves that they will decide 
his fate — they are mistaken ; it is the Mountain, 
not they, that will carry the day. The Mountain 
is so far advanced in the career of crime that 
it cannot recede. Besides, it is indispensable 
for it to render the Gironde as guilty as itself, 
in order to deprive it of the possibility of treat- 
ing separately ; that motive will lead to the 
destruction of Louis XVI." — i. 142, 143. 

These observations are perfectly just; whe- 
ther they were made by Lanjuinais or not at the 
period when they are said to have been spoken, 
may be doubtful ; but of this we are convinced, 
that they contain the whole theory and true 
secret of the causes which convert popular 
movements into guilty revolutions. It is the 
early commission of crime which renders sub- 
sequent atrocities unavoidable ; men engage 
in the last deeds of cruelty to avoid the pun- 
ishment of the first acts of oppression. The 
only rule which can with safety be followed, 
either in political or private life, is uniformly 
to abstain from acts of injustice; never to do 
evil that good may come of it ; but invariably to 
ask, in reference to any proposed measure, not 
merely whether it is expedient, but whether it 
■ is just. If any other principle be adopted — if 
once the system is introduced of committing 
acts of injustice or deeds of cruelty, from the 
pressure of popular clamour, or the supposed 
expediency of the measures, the career of guilt 
is commenced, and can seldom be arrested. 
The theory of public morals, complicated as 
it may appear, is in reality nothing but a re- 
petition, on a greater scale, of the measures 
of virtue in private life ; crime cannot be com- 
mitted with impunity in the one more than the 
other, with this difference, that if the individuals 
who commit the wrong escape retribution, it 
will fall on the state to which they belong. 

One of the most important steps in the pro- 
gress of the Revolution, and from which so 
much evil subsequently flowed, was the failure 
in the impeachment of Marat by the Girondists 
in 1792. Marat's defence on that occasion, 
which is here given from the Moniteur, is a 
choice specimen of the revolutionary talent 
which then exercised so powerful a sway. 

" I am accused of having conspired with 
Robespierre and Danton for a triumvirate; 
that accusation has not a shadow of truth, ex- 
cept so far as concerns myself. — I am bound 
in duty to declare that my colleagues, Danton 
and Robespierre, have constantly rejected the 



idea alike of a triumvirate or a dictatorship. — 
If any one is to blame for having scattered 
these ideas among the public, it is myself; I 
invoke on my own head the thunder of the na 
tional vengeance — but before striking, deign 
to hear me. 

" When the constituted authorities exerted 
their power only to enchain the people ; to 
murder the patriots under the name of the law, 
can you impute it to me as a crime that I in- 
voked against the wicked the tempest of popu- 
lar vengeance? — No — if you call it a crime, 
the nation would give you the lie; obedient to 
the law, they felt that the method I proposed 
was the only one which could save them, and 
assuming the rank of a dictator, they at once 
purged the land of the traitors who infested 
it. — 

" I shuddered at the vehement and disorderly 
movements of the people, when I saw them 
prolonged beyond the necessary point; in order 
that these movements should not for ever fail, 
to avoid the necessity of their recommencement, 
I proposed that some wise and just citizen 
should be named, known for his attachment to 
freedom, to take the direction of them, and ren- 
der them conducive to the great ends of public 
freedom. — If the people could have appreciated 
the wisdom of that proposal, if they had adopt- 
ed it in all its plenitude, they would have swept 
off", on the day the Bastile was taken, five hun- 
dred heads from the conspirators. Every thing, 
had this been done, would now have been tran- 
quil. — For the same reason, I have frequently 
proposed to give instantaneous authority to a 
wise man, under the name of tribune, or dicta- 
tor, — the title signifies nothing; but the proof 
that I meant to chain him to the public service 
is, that I insisted that he should have a bullet 
at his feet, and that he should have no power 
but to strike off" criminal heads. — Such was my 
opinion ; I have expressed it freely in private, 
and given it all the currency possible in my 
writings ; I have affixed my name to these com- 
positions; I am not ashamed of them ; if you 
cannot comprehend them, so much the worse 
for you. — The days of trouble are not yet ter- 
minated ; already a hundred thousand patriots 
have been massacred because you would not 
listen to my voice ; a hundred thousand more 
will suffer, or are menaced with destruction ; if 
the people falter, anarchy wfll never come to 
an end. I have diffused those opinions among 
the public ; if they are dangerous, let enlight- 
ened men refute them with the proofs in their 
hands ; for my own part, I declare I would be 
the first to adopt their ideas, and to give a sig- 
nal proof of my desire for peace, order, and 
the supremacy of the laws, whenever I am con- 
vinced of their justice. 

"Am I accused of ambitious views? I will not 
condescend to vindicate myself; examine my 
conduct ; judge my life. If I had chosen to sell 
my silence for profit, I might have now been 
the object of favour to the court. — What on the 
other hand has been my fate ? I have buried 
myself in dungeons ; condemned myself to 
every species of danger ; the sword of twenty 
thousand assassins is perpetually suspended 
over me ; I preached the truth with my head 
laid on the block. Let those who arenowtei 



244 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



rifying you with the shadow of a dictator, unite 
with me; unite with all true patriots, press 
the Assembly to expedite the great measures 
which will secure the happiness of the people, 
and I will cheerfully mount the scaffold any 
day of my life." — Vol. i. pp. 75, 76. 

We have given this speech at length, be- 
cause it contains a fair sample of revolutionary 
logic, and displays that mixture of truth and 
error, of generous sentiments and perverted 
ambition, which characterized the speeches as 
well as the actions of the leaders. Marat was 
well acquainted with his power before he made 
these admissions; he knew that the armed 
force of the multitude would not permit a hair 
of his head to be touched; he already saw his 
adversaries trembling under the menaces 
which encircled the hall, and the applause of 
the galleries which followed his words; he had 
the air of generous self-devotion, when in truth 
he incurred no real danger. The principles 
here professed were those on which he and 
his party constantly acted. Their uniform doc- 
trine was, that they must destroy their enemies, 
or be destroyed by them ; that the friends of the 
Revolution were irrevocably engaged in a strife 
of life or death with the aristocracy ; that there 
was no alternative in the struggle — it must be 
victory or death. Such were the maxims of 
the Jacobins, and we should greatly err if we 
ascribed them to any peculiar or extraordinary 
ferocity or wickedness in their character. They 
sprung entirely from their early commission 
of unpardonable offences, and the recklessness 
with which they perpetrated acts of violence 
and spoliation, the moment that they obtained 
supreme power. The conclusion to be drawn 
from this is, not that the progress of innova- 
tion and social amelioration inevitably leads 
to wickedness, but that the commission of one 
crime during its progress necessarily occa- 
sions another, because it is in the commission 
of the second that impunity for the first is alone 
looked for; and therefore, that the only way 
during such trying times to prevent the pro- 
gress from terminating in disaster, is steadily 
to adhere to the principles of justice and hu- 
manity; and if violence is once unavoidable, 
to revert to the temper and moderation of hap- 
pier times, the moment that such a return is 
practicable. 

The Jacobin Club, the Dom-daniel where all 
the bloody scenes of the Revolution were hatch- 
ed, must ever be an object of interest and cu- 
riosity to future ages. The author's picture of 
it is so graphic, that we shall give it in his own 
words, for fear of weakening their force by 
translation; it will also serve as a fair speci- 
men of his style. 

"Le club des Jacobins etait veritablement le 
double de la puissance souveraine, et la por- 
tion la plus energique : on ne pouvait assez 
la redouter, tant sa susceptibility etait ex- 
treme et ses vengeances terribles. II se mon- 
trait inquiet, pusillanime, mefiant, cruel et 
feroce ; il ne concevait la liberte qu'avec le 
concours des prisons, des fers, et i deminoyee 
dans le sang. Tousles maux, tous les crimes, 
toutes les resolutions funestes, qui pendant trois 
annees desolerent la France, partirent de cet 
antre d'horreur. Les Jacobins dominerent 



avec une tyrannie epaisse, vaste et lourde, qui 
nous enveloppa tous comme un cauchemar 
permanent. Inquisition terrible, violente, et 
neanmoins cauteleuse, il se nourrissait d'epou- 
vante calculee, de furenrs, de denonciations, 
et de 1'effroi general qu'il inspirait. Les plus 
importans parmi les revolutionaires tirerent 
de la toute leur force, et en meme temps ne 
cesserent de flagorner, d'adulerceclub, et cela 
avec autant de persistance, que de bassesse : 
a tel point la masse du club abait du pouvoir, 
et a tel point celui qu'obtenaient des particuli- 
ers devait remonter a lui, comme a son origine 
unique. 

"Jamais un homme d'honneur, jamais la 
vertu paree de ses qualites precieuses ne purent 
etre souflerts dans cette societe: elle etait an- 
tipathique avec tout ce qui n'etait pas entache 
d'une maniere quelconque. Un voleur, un as- 
sassin, y trouvait plus d'afnnite que le vole ou 
le victime. Le propos celebre, Qu'as hi fait 
pour etre pendu, si Vancicn regime revenait ? pou- 
vait s'applique egalement a la morale, qu'a la 
politique. Quiconque se presentait avec une 
vie exempte de reproches devenait suspect ne- 
cessairement: mais l'impur inspirait de l'in- 
teret, et se trouvait en harmonie, ou en point 
de contact avec les habitues de ce cloaque. 
Le club se reunissait a l'ancien convent des 
Jacobins, dans la Rue St. Honore, au local de 
la bibliotheque: e'etait une salle vaste de forme 
gothique. On orna le local de drapeaux tri- 
colores, de devises anarchiques, de quelques 
portraits et bustes des revolutionaires les plus 
fameux. J'ai vu, bien anterieurement au 
meurtre de Louis XVI., deux portraits, ceuxde 
Jacques Clement et de Ravaillac, environnes 
d'une guirlande de chene, en maniere de cou- 
ronne civique: au-dessous leur nom, accom- 
pagne de la date de leur regicide, et au-dessus 
il y avoit ces mots lis fare at heurcux — Us tuerent 
un roi." — Tom. i. pp. 110 — 112. 

It may be imagined from these and similar 
passages that the author is a royalist: but such 
in reality is not the case. He is equally severe 
on the other parties, and admits that he him- 
self acquiesced in all the savage measures of 
the Convention. The Jacobins in fact have 
become equal objects of detestation to all par- 
ties in the Revolution : to the royalists, by the 
cruelties which they exercised — to the republi- 
cans, by the horror which they excited, and the 
reaction against the principles of popular go- 
vernment which they produced. The descrip- 
tion of them by Thiers and Mignet is nearly as 
black as that given by our author. 

It is a curious speculation what it is during 
revolutionary troubles that gives an influence 
to men of desperate character. Why is it that 
when political institutions are undergoing a 
change, the wicked and profligate should ac- 
quire so fearful an ascendency 1 That thieves 
and robbers should emerge from their haunts 
when a conflagration is raging, is intelligible 
enough, — but that they should then all at once 
become omnipotent, and rule their fellow citi- 
zens with absolute sway, is the surprising phe- 
nomenon. In considering the causes of this 
catastrophe in France, much is no doubt to be 
ascribed to the corrupt and rotten state of 
society under the monarchy, and the total want 



THE REIGN OF TERROR. 



245 



of all those habits of combination for mutual 
defence and support, which arise from the 
long-continued enjoyment of freedom. More 
however, we are persuaded, is to be ascribed 
to the general and unparalleled desertion of 
their country by the great majority of the 
nobility and landed proprietors, and their im- 
prudent — to give it no severer name — union 
with foreign powers to regain their privileges 
by main force. If this immense and powerful 
body of men had remained at home, yielded to 
the torrent when they could not resist it, and 
taken advantage of the first gleams of return- 
ing sense and moderation, to unite with the 
friends of order of every denomination, it is 
impossible to doubt that a great barrier against 
revolutionary violence must have been erected. 
But what could be done by the few remaining 
priests and royalists, or by the king on the 
throne, when a hundred thousand proprietors, 
the strength and hope of the monarchy, de- 
serted to the enemy, and appeared combating 
against France under the Austrian eagles! 
There was the fatal error. Every measure of 
severity directed against them or their de- 
scendants, appeared justifiable to a people 
labouring under the terrors of foreign subjuga- 
tion; if they had remained at home and armed 
against the stranger, as the worst mediator in 
their internal dissensions, the public feeling 
would not have been so strongly roused against 
them, and many of the worst measures of the 
Revolution would have been prevented. The 
comparatively bloodless character of the Eng- 
lish civil war in the time of Charles I. is in a 
great measure to be ascribed to the courageous 
residence of the landed proprietors at home, 
even during the hottest of the struggle ; and but 
for that intrepid conduct, they might, like the 
French noblesse, have been for ever stript of 
their estates, and the cause of freedom stained 
by unnecessary excesses. 

Uur author visited Dumourier, when he re- 
turned to Paris, to endeavour to stem the tor- 
rent of the Revolution. — On that occasion, the 
general addressed him in these remarkable 
words: — 

"If the men of honour in the country would 
act as I do, these miserable anarchists would 
speedily be reduced to their merited insignifi- 
cance, and France would be delivered; but 
they fear them, and the terror which they in- 
spire constitutes their whole strength. I shall 
never permit them at least to extend their pow- 
er over my determinations." 

"Dumourier was right; it is the weakness 
of honest men which in every age has consti- 
tuted the strength of the rabble." — Vol. i. 
p. 128. 

He mentions a singular fact, well known to 
all who are tolerably acquainted with the his- 
tory of the Revolution, which remarkably illus- 
trates the slender reliance which during the 
fervour of a revolution can be placed on the 
support of the populace. — 

"The Girondists trusted to their patriotism, 
to the pledges they had never ceased to give to 
the popular cause; they constantly flattered 
themselves that the people would keep their 
qualities in remembrance; and experience ne- 
ver taught them that the people, ever ungrate- 



ful and forgetful of past services, have neither 
eyes nor ears but for those who flatter them 
without intermission. They had another rea- 
son for their confidence, in the enormous ma- 
jority which had recently re-elected Petion 
to the important situation of mayor of Paris. 
No less than 14,000 voices had pronounced 
in his favour, while Robespierre had only 23, 
Billaud-Varennes 14, and Dan ton 11. The 
Girondists flattered themselves that their influ- 
ence was to be measured in the same propor- 
tion; that error was their ruin, for they con- 
tinued to cling to it down to the moment when 
necessity constrained them to see that they 
stood alone in the commonwealth. Bailly, the 
virtuous Bailly, that pure spirit who had the 
misfortune to do so much evil with the best 
intentions, had only two votes." — Vol. i. p. 130. 

Thus the Girondists, only a few months be- 
fore their final arrest and overthrow by the 
mob of Paris, had fourteen thousand votes, 
while Robespierre and Danton, who led them 
out to the slaughter, had only thirty-four. 
Whence arose this prodigious decline of popu- 
larity in so short a time, and when they had 
done nothing in the intervening period to jus- 
tify or occasion it? Simply from this, that 
having latterly endeavoured to repress the 
movement, that instant their popularity dis- 
solved like a rope of sand, and they were con- 
signed in a few months to the scaffold by their 
late noisy supporters. 

This respectable writer adds his testimony 
to a fact now generally admitted, that, the well- 
known novel of Faublas gave a correct picture 
of the manners of France at the outset of the 
Revolution. In such a corrupt state of society, 
it is not surprising that political change should 
have led to the most disastrous results : nor 
can any thing be imagined much worse than 
the old regime. 

"Louvet de Courtray, born at Paris in 1764, 
was the son of a shopkeeper, and made his 
debut, not as an advocate, but as a shopman 
in the employment of Brault. the bookseller. 
He there acquired a taste for literature, which 
he soon made known by his well-known novel 
of Faublas. The Revolution commenced, and 
despite its agitation, the ' Amours and gallant 
Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas' soon 
obtained a deserved reputation. You find in 
that book a faithful picture of the manners of 
the age — its levity, its follies ; the mode of life 
of good company is there accurately depicted ; 
and if decencj^ is little respected, it is because 
it met with as little respect at the period when 
the hero of the story was supposed to be liv- 
ing." — Vol. i. p. 145. 

But Ave must hasten to yet more interesting 
scenes. The appearance of the Duke of Or- 
leans when he voted for the death of the king 
is thus described. 

"Egalite, walking with a faltering step and 
a countenance paler than the corpse already 
stretched in the tomb, advanced to the place 
where he was to put the seal to his eternal in- 
famy ; and there, unable to utter a word in 
public unless it was written down, he read ir. 
these terms his fearful vote : 

" ' Exclusively governed by my duty, ana 
convinced that all those who have resisted th 
x2 



246 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



sovereignty of the people deserve death, mj r 
vote is for Death !' 

"'Oh, the monster!' broke forth from all 
sides; 'how infamous!' and general hisses 
and imprecations attended Egalite as he re- 
turned to his seat. His conduct appeared so 
atrocious, that of all the assassins of Septem- 
ber, of all the wretches of every description 
who were there assembled, and truly the num- 
ber was not small, not one ventured to applaud 
him : all, on the contrary, viewed him with 
distrust or maledictions ; and at the conclu- 
sion of his vote, the agitation of the assembly 
was extreme. One would have imagined from 
the effect it produced, that Egalite, by that 
single vote, irrevocably condemned Louis to 
death, and that all that followed it was but a 
vain formality." — Vol. ii. p. 48. 

One of the most instructive facts in the 
whole history of the Revolution, was the una- 
nimous vote of the assembly on the guilt of 
Louis. Posterity has reversed the verdict; it 
is now unanimously agreed that he was inno- 
cent, and that his death was a judicial murder. 
That the majority, constrained by fear, misled 
by passion, or seduced by ambition, should 
have done so, is intelligible enough ; but that 
seven hundred men should unanimously have 
voted an innocent man guilty, is the real phe- 
nomenon, for which no adequate apology can 
be found even in the anxieties and agitation of 
that unhappy period. Like all other great acts 
of national crime, it speedily brought upon it- 
self its own punishment. It rendered the march 
of the Revolution towards increasing wicked- 
ness inevitable, because it deprived its leaders 
of all hope of safety but in the rule of the mul- 
titude, supported by acts of universal terror. 

The result of the vote which, by a majority 
of forty-seven, condemned Louis to death, is 
well described : 

"When the fatal words were pronounced, 
an explosion of satanic joy was expected from 
the tribunes : nothing of the kind occurred. A 
universal stupor took possession of the whole 
assembly, damping alike the atrocious hurras 
and the infernal applause. The victory which 
had been obtained filled the victors with as 
much awe as it inspired the vanquished with 
consternation; hardly was a hollow murmur 
heard ; the members gazed at each other in 
death-like silence ; every one seemed to dread 
even the sound of his own voice. There is 
something so over-powering in great events, 
that those even whose passions they most com- 
pletely satisfy, are restrained from giving vent 
to their feelings." — Vol. ii. p. 61. 

The death of the king, and its effect on the 
people, is very impressive : 

"The sight of the royal corpse produced 
divers sensations in the minds of the specta- 
tors. Some cut off parts of his dress ; others 
sought to gather a few fragments of his hair; 
a few dipped their sabres in his blood ; and 
many hurried from the scene, evincing the 
most poignant grief in their countenances. 
An Englishman, bolder than the rest, threw 
himself at the foot of the scaffold, dipped his 
handkerchief in the blood which covered the 
ground, and disappeared. 

" In the capital, the great body of the citi- 



zens appeared to be overwhelmed by a general 
stupor : they hardly ventured to look each other 
in the face in the street: sadness was depicted 
in every countenance: a heavy disquietude 
seemed to have taken possession of every mind. 
The day following the execution they had not 
got the better of their consternation, which ap- 
peared then to have reached the members of 
the Convention, who were astonished and ter- 
rified at so bold a stroke, and the possible con- 
sequences with which it might be followed. 
Immediately after the execution, the body of 
Louis XVI. was transported into the ancient 
cemetery of the Madeleine : it was placed in a 
ditch of six feet square, with its back against 
the wall of the Rue d'Anjou, and covered with 
quick-lime, which was the cause of its being so 
difficult afterwards, in 1815, to discover the 
smallest traces of his remains. 

" The general torpor, without doubt, para- 
lyzed many minds, but shame had a large 
effect upon others. Ii was certainly a deplo- 
rable thing to see the king put to death without 
the smallest effort being made to save him from 
destruction; and on the supposition that such 
an attempt might have led to his assassination 
by the Jacobins, even that would have been 
preferable to the disgraceful tranquillity which 
prevailed at his execution. I am well aware 
that all who had emigrated had abandoned the 
king; but as there remained in the interior so 
many loyal hearts devoted to his cause, it is 
astonishing that no one should have shown 
himself on so rueful an occasion. Has crime 
then alone the privilege of conferring audacity ? 
is weakness inseparable from virtue"! I can- 
not believe it, although every thing conspired 
to favour it at that period, when the bravest 
trembled and retired into secrecy." — Vol. ii. 
pp. 13, 44. 

The Girondists were far from reaping the 
benefits they expected from the death of the 
king; Lanjuinais's prophecy in this respect 
proved correct: it was but the forerunner of 
their own ruin. 

"The death of Louis, effected by a combina- 
tion of all parties, satisfied none. The Giron- 
dists in particular, as Lanjuinais had foretold, 
found in it the immediate cause of their ruin. 
Concessions made to crime benefit none but 
those who receive them : they make use of 
them and speedily forget the givers. This was 
soon demonstrated ; for no sooner was the trial 
of Louis concluded by his death, than the Ja- 
cobins commenced their attacks on Roland, the 
minister of the interior, with such vehemence, 
that on the day after the king's execution he 
sent in his resignation. 

"The Girondists did every thing in their 
power to prevent him from proceeding to this 
extremity: his wife exerted all her influence 
to make him retain his situation, offering to 
share all his labours, and take upon herself 
the whole correspondence. It was all in vain: 
he declared that death would be preferable to 
the mortifications he had to undergo ten times 
a day. What made his friends so anxious to 
retain him was their conviction that they 
could find no one to supply his place. They 
clearly saw their situation, when it was no 
longer possible to apply a remedy. The 



THE REIGN OF TERROR. 



247 



Mountain, strong through their weakness, 
overwhelmed them : already it broke through 
every restraint, and the system of terror, so 
well organized afier the revolution of the 10th 
of August, was put into full activity." — Vol. ii. 
pp. 153, 154. 

It has never yet been clearly explained how 
Robespierre rose to the redoubtable power 
which he possessed for sixteen months before 
his death. His contemporaries are unanimous 
in their declarations that his abilities were ex- 
tremely moderate, that his courage was doubt- 
ful, and his style of oratory often tiresome and 
perplexed. How, if all this be true, did he 
succeed in rising to the head of an assembly 
composed of men of unquestioned ability, and 
ruled by the oldest and most audacious orators 
in France? How did he compose the many 
and admirable speeches, close in reasoning, 
energetic in thought, eloquent in expression, 
which he delivered from the tribune, and which 
history has preserved to illustrate his name] 
Supposing them to have been written by others, 
how did he maintain his authority at the Ja- 
cobin Club, whose noctural orgies generally 
took a turn which no previous foresight could 
have imagined, and no ordinary courage could 
withstand] How did he conduct himself in 
such a manner as to destroy all his rivals, and, 
at a time when all were burning with ambi- 
tion, contrive to govern France with an au- 
thority unknown to Louis XIV.] The truth 
is, Robespierre must have been a man of most 
extraordinary ability; and the depreciatory 
testimony of his contemporaries probably pro- 
ceeded from that envy which is the never-fail- 
ing attendant of sudden and unlooked-for ele- 
vation. The account of the system he pursued, 
in order to raise himself to supreme power, is 
pregnant with instruction. 

"It was at this period (March, 1793) that 
Robespierre began to labour seriously at the 
plan which was destined to lead him to the 
dictatorship. It consisted, in the first instance, 
in getting rid of the Gironde by means of the 
Mountain ; and secondly, in destroying by their 
aid every man of the ancient regime, capable 
by his rank, his talent, or his virtue, of stand- 
ing in his way. It was indispensable to reduce 
to his own level all the heads above himself 
which he suffered to exist, and among those 
which it was necessary to cut off, he ranked in 
the first class those of the queen and of Ega- 
lite. Having done this, his next object was to 
destroy the Mountain itself: he resolved to 
decimate it in its highest summits, in such a 
manner that he alone would remain, and no- 
thing oppose his governing France with abso- 
lute sway. Robespierre at the same time as- 
sailed with mortal anxiety all the military re- 
putations which might stand in his way; and, 
in the end, death delivered him from every ge- 
neral from whose opposition he had any thing 
to apprehend. 

"That this frightful plan existed, is but too 
certain ; that it was executed in most of its 
parts, is historically known. That it did not 
finally succeed, was merely owing to the cir- 
cumstance that the Jacobins, made aware of 
their danger before it was too late, assailed 
him when he was unprepared, and overturned 



I him in a moment of weakness." — Vol. ii. pp. 
192—195. 

Fouquier-Tinville, the well-known public 
accuser in the revolutionary tribunal, is drawn 
in the following graphic terms : — 

" Fouquier-Tinville, a Picard by birth, born 
in 1747, and procureur in the court of the 
Chatelet, exhibited one of those extraordinary 
characters in which there is such a mixture of 
bad and strange qualities as to be almost incon- 
ceivable. Gloomy, cruel, atrabilious: the un- 
sparing enemy of every species of merit or 
virtue; jealous, artful, vindictive : ever ready 
to suspect, to aggravate the already overwhelm- 
ing dangers of innocence, he appeared imper- 
vious to every feeling of compassion or equity; 
justice in his estimation consisted in condem- 
nation ; an acquittal caused him the most se- 
vere mortification ; he was never happy but 
when he had sent all the accused to the scaf- 
fold: he prosecuted them with an extreme 
acharnement, made it a point of honour to repel 
their defences: if they were firm or calm in 
presence of the judges of the tribunal, his rage 
knew no bounds. But with all this hatred to 
what generally secures admiration and esteem, 
he showed himself alike insensible to the allure- 
ments of fortune and the endearments of do- 
mestic life : he was a stranger to every species 
of recreation : women, the pleasures of the 
table, the theatres, had for him no attractions. 
Sober in his habits of life, if he ever became 
intoxicated, it was with the commonest kind 
of wine. The orgies in which he participated 
had all a political view, as, for example, to 
procure a feu de file ; on such occasions he was 
the first to bring together the judges and juries, 
and to provoke bacchanalian orgies. What he 
required above every thing was human blood. 

" A feu de file, in the Jacobin vocabulary, 
was the condemnation to death of all the ac- 
cused. When it took place, the countenance 
of Fouquier Tinville became radiant; no on? 
could doubt that he was completely happy; 
and to attain such a result he spared no pains. 
He was, to be sure, incessantly at work : he 
went into no society, hardly ever showed him- 
self at the clubs : it was not there, he said, that 
his post lay. The only recreation which he 
allowed himself was to go to the place of exe- 
cution, to witness the pangs of his victims: 
on such occasions his gratification was ex- 
treme. 

" Fouquier Tinville might have amassed a 
large fortune: he was, on the contrary, poor, 
and his wife, it is said, actually died of starva- 
tion. He lived without any comforts: his 
whole furniture, sold after his decease, only 
produced the sum of five hundred francs. He 
was distinguished by the appearance of po- 
verty and a real contempt of money. No 
species of seduction could reach him : he was 
a rock, a mass of steel, insensible to every 
thing which usually touches men, to beauty 
and riches : he became animated only at t l e 
prospect of a murder which might be com- 
mitted, and on such occasions he was almost 
handsome, so radiant was the expression of 
his visage. 

" The friend of Robespierre, who fully ap- 
preciated his valuable qualities, he was the 



248 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



depository of his inmost thoughts. The Dic- 
tator asked him one day, what he could offer 
him most attractive, when supreme power was 
fully concentrated in his hands. 'Repose,' 
replied Fouquier Tinville, 'but not till it is 
proved that not another head remains to fall ; 
incessant labour till then.' " — Vol. ii. 216, 217. 

On reading these and similar passages re- 
garding the Reign of Terror, and the charac- 
ters which then rose to eminence, one is 
tempted to ask, is human nature the same un- 
der such extraordinary circumstances as in 
ordinary times; or is it possible, that by a 
certain degree of political excitement, a whole 
nation may go mad, and murders be perpe- 
trated without the actors being in such a state 
as to be morally responsible for their actions] 
In considering this question, the conclusion 
which is irresistibly impressed on the mind by 
a consideration of the progress of the French 
Revolution, is, that the error lies more in the 
head than in the heart, and that it is by the 
incessant application of false principles to 
the understanding, that the atrocious actions 
which excite the astonishment of posterity are 
committed. Without doubt there are in all 
troubled times a host of wicked and aban- 
doned men, who issue from their haunts, 
stimulated by cupidity, revenge, and every 
evil passion, and seek to turn the public cala- 
mities to their individual advantage. But 
neither the leaders nor the majority of their 
followers are composed of such men. The 
political fanatics, those who do evil that good 
may come, — who massacre in the name of hu- 
manity, and imprison in that of public free- 
dom, — these are the men who are most to be 
dreaded, and who, in general, acquire a peril- 
ous sway over the minds of their fellow citi- 
zens. When vice appears in its native 
deformity, it is abhorred by all : it is by as- 
suming the language and working upon the 
feelings of virtue that it acquires so fatal an 
ascendant, and that men are led to commit the 
most atrocious actions, in the belief that they 
are performing the most sacred of duties. The 
worst characters of the Revolution who sur- 
vived the scaffold, were found in private life 
to have their humanity unimpaired, and to lead 
peaceable and inoffensive lives. Barrere is 
now, or was very recently, at Brussels, where 
his time is devoted to declaiming on the ne- 
cessity of entirely abolishing capital punish- 
ments ; and yet Barrere is the man who pro- 
posed the famous decree for the annihilation 
of Lyons, beginning with the words "Lyons 
faisait la guerre a la liberte : Lyons n'est 
plus;" and constantly affirmed, that "le vais- 
seau de la Revolution ne peut arriver au port 
que sur une ocean du sang." 

The origin and composition of the famous 
Committee of Public Safety, and the manner in 
which it gradually engrossed the whole powers 
of the state, and became concentrated in the 
persons of the Triumvirate, are thus given: 

"It was on the 6th April, 1793," says our 
author, " that the terrible Committee of Public 
Safety was constituted: which speedily drew 
to itself all the powers in the state. It did not 
manifest its ambition at the outset: it was 
useful at starting: it exhibited no symptoms 



of an ambitious disposition, but that prudent 
conduct ceased after the great revolt of 31st 
May. Then the Convention, its committees, 
and in an especial manner that of General 
Safety, fell under the yoke of the Committee 
of Public Safety, which performed the part of 
the Council of Ten and the Three inquisitors 
in the Venetian state. Its power was mon- 
strous, because it was in some sort concealed ; 
because amidst the multitude of other com- 
mittees it veiled its acts ; because, renewing 
itself perpetually among men of the same 
stamp, it constantly destroyed the personal re- 
sponsibility of its members, though its mea- 
sures were ever the same. 

" The Committee of Public Safety terminated 
by being concentrated, not in the whole of its 
members, but in three of their number. Robes- 
pierre was the real chief, but half concealed 
from view ; the two others were Couthon and 
St. Just. There was between these monsters 
a perfect unanimity down to the moment of 
their fall: in proportion as the Mountain was 
divided and its chiefs perished, the alliance 
between them became more firmly cemented. 
I have every reason to believe that they had 
resolved to perpetuate their power in unison, 
and under the same title which Bonaparte 
afterwards adopted at the 18th Brumaire. 
Robespierre, Couthon, and St. Just were to 
have formed a supreme council of three con- 
suls. The first, with the perpetual presidency, 
was to have been intrusted with the depart- 
ments of the exterior, of justice, and of the 
finances: Couthon was to have had the in- 
terior; and St. Just the war portfolio, which 
suited his belligerent inclination." — p. 229. 

One of the most singular circumstances in 
all civil convulsions, when they approach a 
crisis, is the mixed and distracted feelings of 
the great majority, even of the actors, in the 
anxious scenes which are going forward. A 
signal instance occurred on occasion of the 
revolt of 31st May, which overturned the Gi- 
rondists, and openly established the supremacy 
of the armed force of Paris over the National 
Convention. This eventful crisis is thus power- 
fully described by our author: — 

" The assembly, in a body, rose to present 
itself at the great gate to go out upon the Place 
de Carousel. We were all uncovered, in token 
of the danger of the country: the president 
alone wore his hat. The officers of the as- 
sembly preceded him : he ordered them to 
clear a passage. Henriot, at that decisive 
moment, breaking out into open revolt, ad- 
vanced on horseback at the head of his aides- 
de-camp. He drew his sabre and addressed 
us in a tone, the arrogance of which was de- 
serving of instant punishment — 'You have no 
orders to give here,' said he, ' return to your 
posts, and surrender the rebellious deputies to 
the people.' Some amongst us insisted: the 
president commanded his officers to seize that 
rebel. Henriot retired fifteen paces, and ex- 
claimed : ' Cannoniers, to your pieces !' The 
troops that surrounded him at the same time 
made preparations to charge us. Already the 
muskets were raised to take aim, the hussars 
drew their sabres, the artillerymen inclined 
their lighted matches towards their pieces. At 



THE REIGN OF TERROR. 



this spectacle, Herault de Sechelles, the presi- 
dent, was disconcerted, turned about, and we 
followed him. He went to all the other gates, 
followed by the same escort: traversed the 
gardens of the Tuileries, and the Place de 
Carousel, in vain seeking to escape: at every 
issue a barrier of cannon and bayonets opposed 
his exit. 

"At the same time, — who would believe it? 
the greater part of the troops, with their hats 
on the point of their bayonets, were shouting: 
' Vive la Convention Nationale !' ' Vive la 
Republique !' ' Peace— Laws— a Constitution !' 
Some cried out : ' Vive la Montague !' a still 
smaller number, 'Ala mort Brissot, Gensonne, 
Vergniaud, Guadet!' A few voices exclaimed, 
'Purge the Convention! let the blood of the 
wicked flow !" — Pp. 379, 380. 

Yet though the opinions of the national 
guard, the armed force of Paris, were thus 
divided, and a minority only supported the 
violent measures of Henriot and the insurgents, 
this minority, by the mere force of unity of 
action, triumphed over all the others, and 
made their unwilling fellow-soldiers the in- 
struments in imposing violence on the legisla- 
ture, and dragging its most illustrious mem- 
bers to prison. Such was the French Revo- 
lution ; and such is the ascendency which in 
all extreme cases of public agitation is acquired 
by audacious, united wickedness, over irre- 
solute, divided virtue. 

It is interesting to examine the line of con- 
duct adopted by the moderate members of the 
assembly after this crisis, which prostrated 
the legislature before the municipality and 
armed force of Paris. The author gives us 
the following account of the principles by 
which he himself and the majority of the mem- 
bers were actuated : — 

"Overwhelmed with consternation as all men 
of property were by the audacity of the revolu- 
tionists, and convinced of our impotence at 
that time, (for virtue has but feeble nerves, 
and none of that vigour which was manifested 
not only by antiquity, but even by our fathers,) 
I asked myself, I am not ashamed to confess, 
whether a public sacrifice to the country would 
ultimately be more advantageous than a silent, 
cautious opposition, which in the end might 
unite to itself all whom the fury of the Moun- 
tain had spared. My answer was, that every 
one must carry on war according to his means; 
and, as in our case, an open resistance would 
have been followed by a speedy overthrow, I 
resolved to assume the appearance of absolute 
indifference, which might leave meat liberty to 
aid many unfortunate persons, and keep alive 
the hope of finally overturning that abomina- 
ble tyranny. 

" Having formed this resolution, I immedi- 
ately proceeded to act upon it. I was present 
at the assembly ; I quitted it without any one 
being sensible of my presence. I lived on 
terms of tolerable intimacy with Dan ton, 
Tallien, the younger Robespierre, so that by 
the aid of their hints and indiscretions, I was 
prepared for every storm which was approach- 
ing. 

"This line of conduct, which was pursued 
at the same time by Durand, Garau, Pupuis, 
32 



Demartin, and a number oi others, perfectly 
succeeded. We were soon forgotten, while 
the remnants of the Jacobin faction assailed 
each other without mercy; we were passed 
over in silence for fifteen months, and that 
happy state of oblivion proved our salvation ; 
for all at once, changing our tactics, and de- 
claring against Robespierre, our unexpected 
vote gave his opponents the majority, and 
soon drew after it the whole Assembly. In less 
than an hour after it was given, we became 
an authority which it was necessary to con- 
sult, and which, continually increasing, be- 
cause it had struck in at the fortunate moment, 
speedily made itself master of that supreme 
authority which the Jacobins were no longer 
in a condition to dispute. 

"I know that our conduct is blamed, and 
was blamed by many persons. A number of 
knights of the saloon exclaim against it: I will 
only ask, which of them, with all their boast- 
ing, did any thing useful at the fail of Robes- 
pierre ? 

"It is necessary in difficult times to dis- 
tinguish obstinate folly from measured energy; 
there would be no wisdom in attempting to 
overthrow the pyramids of Egypt by striking 
them with the hand : but in beginning with the 
upper tier, and successively pulling down all 
those which compose the mass, the object 
might be accomplished." — Vol. iii. p. 78. 

This passage involves a question of the 
utmost moment to all true patriots in periods 
of public danger from civil convulsion ; which 
is, what should be their conduct when they are 
openly assailed by an anarchical faction? The 
answer to this is to be found in the situation 
of the parties, at the time when the collision 
takes place. If supreme authority, that of the 
armed force, has not passed into the hands of 
the anarchists, every effort should be made to 
retain it in the possession of the holders of 
property; but if that is impossible,. the conduct 
pursued by these members of the Convention 
at that period is not only the most prudent, but 
in the end the most useful. To " stoop to con- 
quer" is a maxim often as applicable to politi- 
cal as to private life; and when the majority 
of a nation are so heated by passion as to be 
incapable of appreciating the force of reason, 
it is only by waiting for the moment when they 
have begun to feel the consequences, that a 
favourable reaction can be anticipated. 

The Reign of Terror is thus described: — 

"The Reign of Terror was a terrible epoch, 
when the patriotic party acted with indescrib- 
able fury, and resistance to it appeared only in 
the feeblest form; a frightful struggle, during 
which punishment was daily inflicted in the 
name of freedom ; when the people were go- 
verned with the most despotic forms, and 
equality existed only for the vilest of assassins. 
Those who have not lived through it can have 
no idea of what it really was ; those who do 
remember it are monsters if they do not do 
their utmost to prevent its recurrence : any go- 
vernment, of whatever kind, and from what- 
ever quarter, should be embraced in prefer- 
ence. Eternal curses on the man who should 
bring it back to his country! 

" Yes, I repeat it : that era has no resera 



250 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Mance to any other. I have seen the despot- 
ism of Napoleon ; I have witnessed the terror 
of 1815; paltry imitations of those tremendous 
years ! France in 1793 and 1794 was furrowed 
in every direction by the revolutionary thun- 
der; the most insignificant commune had its 
denouncers and its executioners. Ridicule 
was frequently joined to atrocity. Recollect 
that village of the Limousin, from the top of 
whose steeple the tricolour flag suddenly dis- 
appeared. A violent disturbance was in- 
stantly raised; search was made for the daring 
offender, who could not be found, and in con- 
sequence a dozen persons were instantly ar- 
rested on suspicion. At length the fragments 
of the flag were discovered suspended from the 
branches of a tree, and it was found that a 
magpie had made its nest with the remains of 
the national colour. Oh, the tyrannical bird ! 
they seized it, cut off its head, and transmitted 
the prunes verbal to the Convention. We re- 
ceived it without bursting into laughter: had 
any one ventured to indulge himself in that 
way, he would have run the risk of perishing 
on the public scaffold. 

"The Jacobins were not ashamed to propose 
to us, and we passed into a law the decree, 
which awarded 50 francs to every girl who 
should any how become a mother. This 
abominable demoralization flowed naturally 
from the manners of that period. They made 
a Goddess of Reason, whose altar was the 
scaffold. They there sacrificed to crime by 
massacring virtue ; nothing sacred or respect- 
able remained : things arrived at length at such 
a point, that the denunciation of the innocent 
was recommended as a duty to sons, friends, 
and servants; in a word, there was no degree 
of degradation to which we did not descend." — 
Vol. iii. pp. 42, 43. 

It is well known that when the Duke of 
Orleans was sent to the scaffold, he was de- 
tained nearly ten minutes opposite to the Palais 
Royal, for no intelligible reason which has yet 
been divulged. The following explanation of 
that circumstance, which our author says he 
received from Tallien, is new to us; we give 
it as we find it, without either vouching for or 
discrediting its truth. 

" It was not without full consideration that 
Robespierre formed his plan in regard to the 
Duke of Orleans, which consisted in this: — 
two presidents were to be established for 
France ; the one to preside over the war depart- 
ment, the other over the interior; the one was 
to execute, the other to direct. The first of 
these places was destined, not for Egalite, but 
for his son, whose character was unsullied; 
the second was to be occupied by Robespierre 
himself. Rut to cement this alliance, Robes- 
pierre insisted as a sine qua non that the daugh- 
ter of Egalite should be given to him in mar- 
riage. The proposition was made by Couthon, 
and Egalite consulted his son upon it, whose 
resolution was decidedly opposed to the alli- 
ance. It was accordingly refused, with every 
affectation of regret on the part of the Duke of 
Orleans ; and thereafter Robespierre's indigna- 
tion knew no bounds. The proposition, how- 
ever, was afterwards renewed through Tallien, 
who had many pecuniary connections with 



Egalite, but with no better success. He 
evinced an invincible repugnance to such a 
son-in-law. 'In that resolution,' said Tallien, 
'I clearly saw the prince of the blood; he was 
deaf to all the offers and considerations of 
advantage which I pointed out.' 

"After Tallien had received this positive 
refusal, he returned to his constituent, who was 
immediately seized with a violent fit of rage, 
and swore to avenge the affront by the destruc- 
tion of the whole family. Every one knows 
how, in consequence, he forced Dumnurier to 
throw off' the mask, and from that incident de- 
duced the flight of young Egalite from the king 
dom, and the arrest of his father. After he 
was imprisoned, Robespierre let him know that 
his fate would be different if he would recon- 
sider his refusal. The answer was still in the 
negative; the rage of the Jacobin then knew 
no bounds, and he decided upon the prompt 
execution of his intended father-in-law. At the 
last moment, a new proposal was made, 
according to Tallien's statement; and if Egal- 
ite, when the fatal car was stopped opposite 
the Palais Royal, had made a signal to indicate 
that he now acquiesced, the means of extri- 
cating him from punishment by means of a 
popular insurrection were prepared. He still 
refused to make the signal, and after waiting 
ten minutes, Robespierre was obliged to let 
him proceed to the scaffold. I give the story 
as Tallien related it to me, without vouching 
for its truth ; but it is well known that this 
was not the only alliance with the royal family 
which Robespierre was desirous of contract- 
ing, and which would have covered with still 
greater infamy the Bourbon race." — Vol. iii. 
179, 180. 

There is no character so utterly worthless, 
that some redeeming point or other is not to be 
found in it. The Duke of Orleans has hitherto 
been considered as one of the most abandoned 
of the human race ; and the eye of impartial 
history could find nothing to rest on, except 
the stoicism of his death, to counterbalance the 
ignominy of his life. If the anecdote here told 
be true, however, another and a nobler trait 
remains ; and the picture of the first prince of 
the blood standing between death and an alli- 
ance with the tyrant of his country, and pre- 
ferring the former, may be set oft* against his 
criminal vote for the death of Louis, and trans- 
mit his name to posterity with a lesser load of 
infamy than has hitherto attached to it. 

The worship of the Goddess of Reason has 
past into a proverb. Here is the description 
of the initiatory "festival" in honour of the 
goddess. 

" The day after the memorable sitting when 
the Christian religion was abolished, the Fes- 
tival of Reason was celebrated in Notre Dame, 
which became the temple of the new divinity. 
The most distinguished artists of the capital, 
musicians and singers, were enjoined to assist 
at the ceremony, under pain of being con- 
sidered suspected and treated as such. The 
wife of Monmoro represented the new divinity ; 
four men, dressed in scarlet, carried her on 
their shoulders, seated in a gilt chair adorned 
with garlands of oak. She had a scarlet cap 
on her head, a blue mantle over her shoulders, 



THE REIGN OF TERROR. 



251 



a white tunic covered her body; in one hand 
she held a pike, in the other an oaken branch. 
Before her marched young women clothed in 
white, with tricolour girdles and crowned with 
flowers. The legislature with red caps, and 
the deputies of the sections brought up the 
rear. 

"The cortege traversed Paris from the hall 
of the Convention to Notre Dame. There the 
goddess was elevated on the high altar, where 
she received successively the adoration of all 
present, while the young women filled the air 
with incense and perfumes. Hymns in honour 
of the occasion were sung, a discourse pro- 
nounced, and every one retired, the goddess no 
longer borne aloft, but on foot or in a hackney 
coach, I forget which. 

" The most odious part of the ceremony con- 
sisted in this, that while the worship of the 
goddess was going on in the nave and in the 
sanctuary, every chapel round the cathedral, 
carefully veiled by means of tapestry hangings, 
became the scene of drunkenness, licentious- 
ness and obscenity. No words can convey an 
idea of the scene ; those who witnessed it alone 
can form a conception of the mixture of disso- 
luteness and blasphemy which took place. Pros- 
titutes abounded in every quarter ; the mysteries 
of Lesbos and Gnidos were celebrated without 
shame before assembled multitudes. The 
tiling made so much noise that it roused the 
indignation of Robespierre himself; and on the 
day of the execution of Chaumette, who had 
presided over the ceremony, he said that he 
deserved death if it was only for the abomi- 
nations he had permitted on that occasion." — 
Vol. iii. p. 195, 196. 

The concluding months of the Reign of 
Terror are thus vividly depicted: — 

" I have now arrived at the solemn period 
when the evil rapidly attained its height, by 
the usual progress of human events, which 
perish and disappear after a limited period, 
though not without leaving on some occasions 
bloody marks of its passage. The revolution- 
ary excesses daily increased, in consequence 
of the union of the depraved perpetrators of 
them. One would have imagined that these 
monsters had but one body, one soul, to such 
a degree were they united in their actions. The 
Mountain in the Assembly, the Committees of 
Public Safety and of General Safety without 
its walls, the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Mu- 
nicipality of Paris, the Clubs of the Jacobins 
and the Cordeliers ; all, according to their 
different destinations, conspired successively 
to bring about the death of the king, the over- 
'iiruw of the monarchy; then all the acts of 
popular despotism; finally, the overthrow of 
the Girondists, who, notwithstanding their 
faults, and even their crimes, were, fairly 
enough, entitled to be placed comparatively 
among the upright characters of the Con- 
vention. 

" This combination of wicked men had filled 
France with terrror; by them opulent cities 
were overturned; the inhabitants of the com- 
munes decimated; the country impoverished 
by means of absurd and terrible regulations ; 
agriculture, commerce, and the arts destroyed; 
the foundations of every species of property 



shaken ; and all the youth of the kingdom 
driven to the frontiers, less to uphold the in- 
tegrity of France, than to protect themselves 
against the just vengeance which awaited them 
both within and without. 

"All bowed the neck before this gigantic 
assemblage of wickedness; virtue resigned 
itself to death or dishonour. There was no 
medium between falling the victims of such 
atrocities or taking a part in them. A uni- 
versal disquietude, a permanent anxiety settled 
over the realm of France ; energy appeared 
only in the extremity of resignation ; it was 
evident that every Frenchman preferred death 
to the effort of resistance, and that the nation 
would submit to this horrid yoke as long as it 
pleased the Jacobins to keep it on. 

" Was then all hope of an amelioration of 
our lot finally lost'? — Unquestionably it was, 
if it had depended only on the efforts of the 
virtuous classes ; but as it is the natural effect 
of suffering to induce a remedy, so it was in 
the shock of the wicked among themselves 
that our only hope of salvation remained ; and 
although nearly a year was destined to elapse 
before this great consummation was effected, 
yet from the beginning of 1794, men gifted 
with foresight began to hope that heaven 
would at length have pity on them, throw the 
apple of discord among their enemies, and 
strike them with that judicial blindness which 
is the instrument it makes use of to punish 
men and nations." — Vol. iii. p. 230. 

The first great symptom of this approaching 
discord was the quarrel between Danton and 
Robespierre, which terminated in the destruc- 
tion of the former. It was impossible that two 
such characters, both eminently ambitious, 
and both strongly entrenched in popular attach- 
ment, could long continue to hold on their 
course together; when their common enemies 
were destroyed, and the adversaries of the 
Revolution scattered, they necessarily fell upon 
each other. It is the strongest proof of the 
ability of Robespierre that he was able to crush 
an adversary who had the precedence of him 
in the path of popularity, who possessed many 
brilliant qualities of which he was destitute; 
whose voice of thunder had so often struck 
terror into the enemies of the Revolution, and 
who was supported by a large and powerful 
party in the capital. It is in vain, after such 
an achievement, to speak of the insignificance 
of Robespierre's abilities, or the tedium of his 
speeches. This great contest is thus described 
— Robespierre is addressing the assembly on 
occasion of the impeachment of his rival. 

"'The Orleans party was the first which 
obtained possession of power; its ramifications 
extended through all the branches of the public 
service. That criminal party, destitute of 
boldness, has always availed itself of existing 
circumstances and the colours of the ruling 
party. Thence has come its fall; for ever 
trusting to dissimulation and never to open 
force, it sank before the energy of men of good 
faith and.public virtue. In all the most favour- 
able circumstances, Orleans failed in resolu- 
tion ; they made war on the nobility to prepare 
the throne for him; at every step you see the 
efforts of his partisans to ruin the court hi* 



252 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



enemy, and preserve the throne: but the fall 
of the one necessarily drew after it that of the 
other. — No royalist could endure a parricide. 

"'A new scene opens. — The opinion of the 
people was so strongly opposed to royalty, that 
it became impossible to maintain it openly. 
Then the Orleans party dissembled anew; it 
was they who proposed the banishment of the 
Bourbons. That policy, however, could not 
resist the energy of the partisans of the Revo- 
lution. In vain did Dumourier, the friend of 
kings and of Orleans, make his calculations ; 
the policy of Brissot and his accomplices was 
soon seen through. — It was a king of the Or- 
leans family that they wished ; thenceforward 
no hope of peace to the republic till the last 
of their partisans has expired. 

"'Danton! you shall answer to inflexible 
justice. Let us examine your past conduct. 
Accomplice in every criminal enterprise, you 
ever espoused the cause which was adverse to 
freedom; you intrigued alike with Mirabcau 
and Dumourier, with Hehert and Herault de 
Sechelles. Danton! you have made yourself 
the slave of tyranny; you opposed Lafayette, 
it is true, but Mirabeau, Orleans, Dumourier, 
did the same. It was by the influence of Mira- 
beau that you were appointed administrator 
of the Department of Paris. Mirabeau, who 
meditated a change of dynasty; felt the value 
of your audacity, and secured it; you then 
abandoned all your former principles, and 
nothing more was heard of you till the massa- 
cre in the Champ de Mars. What shall I say 
of your cowardly desertion of the public inte- 
rest in every crisis, where you uniformly 
adopted the party of retreating.' 

" At the conclusion of this incomprehensible 
tirade, he proposed that Camille Desmoulins, 
Herault, Danton, Lacroix, Philippaux, convict- 
ed of accession to the conspiracy of Dumou- 
rier, should be sent to the revolutionary tri- 
bunal. 

"Not one voice ventured to raise itself in 
favour of the accused. Their friends trembled 
and were silent. The decree passed unani- 
mously, and with every expression of enthusi- 
asm. The galleries imitated us: and from 
those quarters, from whence so often had 
issued bursts of applause in favour of Danton, 
now were heard only fierce demands for his 
head. This is the ordinary march of the 
public mind during a revolution. Fervid ad- 
miration of no one is of long duration : a 
breath establishes, a breath undoes it. In 
France this change was experienced in its 
turn by every leader of the Mountain. — Vol. iii. 
p. 338. 

The final struggle which led to the over- 
throw of Robespierre has exercised the talents 
of many historians. None have given it in 
more vivid terms than our author: — 

" The battalions of the sections, who had 
been convoked by the emissaries sent into the 
different quarters of Paris, arrived successively 
at the Tuileries around the National Assem- 
bly. Tallien said to the chief of the civic 
lorce — ' Depart, and when the sun rises, may 
he not shine on one conspirator in Paris.' 

"The night was dark; the moon was in its 
first quarter ; but the public anxiety had sup- 



plied that defect by a general illumination. 
The defenders of the National Convention 
followed the line of the quay, bringing with 
them several pieces of cannon; they marched 
in silence. Impressed with the grandeur of 
their mission, they sustained each other's cou- 
rage without the aid of the vociferations and 
exclamations which are the resource of those 
who march to pillage and disorder. 

"The place in front of the H6tel-de-Ville 
was filled with detachments of the national 
guard attached to the cause of the insurgents, 
companies of cannoniers and squadrons of 
gendarmerie, and with a multitude of indivi- 
duals, some armed, others not, all inflamed 
with the most violent spirit of Jacobinism, or 
perhaps in secret sacrificing to fear. 

" Leonard Bourdon, who was uncertain whe- 
ther he should commence hostilities by at once 
attacking the different groups assembled on 
the place, before coming to that extremity re- 
solved to despatch an agent of the Committee 
of Public Safety, named Dulac, a courageous 
man, but not apt unnecessarily to expose his life. 
Dulac did so, and read to the assembled crowd 
the decree of the Convention which declared 
Robespierre and his associates Ivors la loi. Im- 
mediately, the greater part of those who were 
assembled came over and arranged themselves 
with the forces of the Convention. Bourdon, 
however, still hesitated to advance, as the re- 
port was spread that the H6tel-de-Ville was 
undermined, and that, rather than surrender, 
the conspirators would blow it and themselves 
in the air. Bourdon therefore kept his posi- 
tion and remained in suspense. 

" Meanwhile every thing in the Hotel-de- 
Ville was in a state of the utmost agitation. 
Irresolution, contradictory resolutions pre- 
vailed. Robespierre had never wielded a sa- 
bre ; St. Just had dishonoured his; Henriot, 
almost drunk, knew not what to do. The mu- 
nicipal guards, a troop well accustomed to 
march towards crime, were stupified when 
they in their turn became the objects of attack. 
All seemed to expect death, without having 
energy enough to strive to avert it by victory. 

"At this crisis Payen read to the conspira- 
tors the decree of the Convention which de- 
clared them hors la loi, and included in the list 
the names of all those in the galleries who 
were applauding their proceedings. The ruse 
was eminently successful, for no sooner did 
these noisy supporters hear their names read 
over in the fatal list, than they dropped off 
one by one, and in a short time the galleries 
were empty. They soon received a melan- 
choly proof how completely they were desert- 
ed. Henriot in consternation descended the 
stairs to harangue the cannoniers, upon whose 
fidelity every thing now depended. All had 
disappeared ; the place was deserted, and in 
their stead Henriot perceived only the heads 
of the columns of the national guard advanc- 
ing in battle-array. 

" He reascended with terror in his looks and 
imprecations in his mouth; he announced the 
total defection of the troops ; — instantly terror 
and despair took possession of that band of 
assassins ; every one turned his fury on his 
neighbour ; nothing but mutual execrations 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



253 



could be heard. Some tried to hide them- 
selves, others to escape. Coffinhal, maddened 
by a transport of rage, seized Henriot in his 
arms, and exclaiming, 'Vile wretch, your 
cowardice has undone us all!' threw him out 
of a window. Henriot was not destined to die 
then ; a dunghill on which he fell so broke 
his fall as to preserve his life for the punish- 
ment which he so richly merited. Lebas took 
a pistol and blew out his brains; Robespierre 
tried to imitate him ; his hand trembled, he 
only broke his jaw, and disfigured himself in 
the most frightful manner. St. Just was found 
with a poignard in his hand, which he had not 
the courage to plunge in his bosom. Couthon 
crawled into a sewer, from whence he was 
dragged by the heels ; the younger Robespierre 
threw himself from the window." 

The scene here described is, perhaps, the 
most memorable in the history of modern 
times ; that in which the most vital interests 
of the human race were at stake, and millions 
watched with trembling anxiety — the result of 
the insurrection of order and virtue against 



tyranny and cruelty. It is a scene which, to 
the end of time, will warmly interest every 
class of readers ; not those merely who delight 
in the dark or the terrible, but all who are in- 
terested in the triumph of freedom over op- 
pression, and are solicitous to obtain for their 
country that first of blessings — a firm and well 
regulated system of general liberty. 

Happen what may in this country, we do 
not anticipate the occurrence of such terrible 
scenes as are here described. The progress 
of knowledge — the influence of the press, 
which is almost unanimous in favour of hu- 
mane measures — the vast extent of property 
at stake in the British islands — the habit of 
acting together, which a free government and 
the long enjoyment of popular rights have 
confirmed, will in all probability save us from 
such frightful convulsions. If the English are 
ever to indulge in unnecessary deeds of cruel- 
ty, they must belie the character which, with 
the single exception of the wars of the Roses, 
they have maintained in all their domestic 
contests since the Norman Conquest. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



Those who are conscious of a good cause, 
and of the support of historical facts, should 
never despair of making truth triumph, even 
under circumstances the most adverse and ap- 
parently hopeless. When we began to treat 
of the French Revolution two years ago, never 
did a resolute journal attempt to stem a more 
vehement torrent of public opinion. It was al- 
most like striving in the days of Peter the 
Hermit against the passion for the Crusades. 
The public mind had been so artfully prepared 
by the incessant abuse of the revolutionary 
press in France and England for years before, 
against Charles X. and the Polignac Adminis- 
tration, to receive the worst impressions con- 
cerning them : they were so completely de- 
ceived by the same channels as to the real 
nature of the Parisian revolt, the objects to 
which it was directed, and the consequences 
with which it was attended, that it was all but 
hopeless to resist the torrent. But we knew 
that our case was rested on historical facts; 
and, therefore, though not possessed of any in- 
formation concerning it, but what we derived 
from the public journals, and shared with the 
rest of our countrymen, we did not scruple to 
make the attempt. 

We had looked into the old Almanac, and 
we did not find it there recorded, that constitu- 
tions, cast off like a medal at a single stroke, 
were of long duration ; we did not find that the 
overthrow of government by explosions of the 
populace in great cities had been found to be 

* Blackwood's Magazine, December, 1832. 

Saint Chamans sur la Revolution tie 1830, et ses 
Suites. Paris, 1832. 

Peyronnet— Questions concerning Parliamentary Ju- 
risdiction. Paris. 1831 ; and Blackwood, Edinburgh. 

Polignac — Considerations Politiquessur l'Epoque Ac- 
tuelle. Paris, 1832; and Blackwood, 1832. 



instrumental in increasing the happiness or 
tranquillity of mankind; we did not know of 
many examples of industry thriving during the 
reign of the multitude, or expenditure increas- 
ing by the destruction of confidence, or credit 
being augmented by a successful exertion of 
the sacred right of insurrection ; and we saw 
no reason to conclude that a government ar- 
ranged in a back-shop in the neighbourhood 
of the Hotel de Ville, by half a dozen democrats, 
supported by shouting bands of workmen, and 
hot-headed students, and sent down by the dili- 
gence or the telegraph to the provinces of 
France, was likely to meet the views, or pro- 
tect the interests, of thirty-two millions of souls 
in its vast territory. For these reasons, though 
possessed of no private information in regard 
to that important event, we ventured from the 
very first to differ from the great majority of 
our countrymen regarding it, and after doing 
all we could to dispel the illusion, quietly wait- 
ed till the course of events should demonstrate 
their justice. 

That course has come, and with a rapidity 
greatly beyond what we anticipated at the out- 
set. The miserable state of France since the 
glorious days, has been such as to have been 
unanimously admitted by all parties. Differ- 
ing on other subjects as far as the poles are 
asunder, they are yet unanimous in repre- 
senting the state of the people since the Revo- 
lution as miserable in the extreme. The Roy- 
alists, the Republicans, the Orleanists, the 
Doctrinaires, vie with each other in painting 
the deplorable state of their country. They 
ascribe it to different causes ; the Republicans 
are clear that it is all owing to Casimir Pener 
and the Doctrinaires, who have arrested the 
people in the middle of their glorious career 



254 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



and turned to gall and wormwood the sweet 
fruits of popular conquest; Guizot, the Duke 
de Broglie, and the Doctrinaires, ascribe it to 
the mad ambition of the democrats, and the in- 
cessant efforts they have made to agitate and 
distract the public mind ; Saint Chamans and 
the Royalists trace it to the fatal deviation 
from the principle of legitimacy, and the inter- 
minable dissensions to which the establishment 
of a right in the populace of Paris to choose 
their sovereign must necessarily lead ; while 
Marshal Soult has a clear remedy for all the 
disorders of the county, and without stopping 
to inquire whether they are revolting from 
starvation, ambition, or experienced evils, cuts 
them down by grape-shot, and charges their 
determined bands by squadrons of cuirassiers. 
Men in this country may vary in the causes to 
which they ascribe these evils, according to 
the side to which they incline in politics; but 
in regard to their existence and magnitude, af- 
ter such a concurrence in the testimony of un- 
willing witnesses, no doubt can be entertained 
by Tory, Reformer, or Radical. 

One single fact is sufficient to place in the 
clearest light the disastrous effect of this con- 
vulsion upon the internal industry of the coun- 
try. It appears from the returns of the French 
Commerce lately published, that their imports 
before and after the Three Glorious Days stood 
thus : J 

r, , . Francs. 

Ueneral imports, 1830, 638,338,000 

Do - 1831, 519,'825ioOO 



Decrease, 118,513,000 



Imports for home consump- 
tion, 1830, 
Do. 1831, 



489,242,000 
374,188,000 



Decrease, 111,054,000 
Thus it appears, that although the Revolu- 
tion did not break out till July 1830, so that 
one-half of the imports of that year was affect- 
ed by the revolt of July, yet still the general 
imports in 1831, as compared with 1830, had 
fallen nearly a fifth, and those for home con- 
sumption about a fourth in a single year ! Such 
is the deplorable effects of popular triumph 
upon public industry, and the suffering and 
starvation brought upon the poor by the crimi- 
nal ambition of their demagogues. 

The progress of events, and, above all, the 
necessity under which Marshal Soult was laid, 
of quelling the insurrection of June, 1832, by 
"a greater number of armed men than corn- 
batted the armies of Prussia or Russia at Jena 
or Austerlitz,"* and following up his victory 
by the proclamation of a state of siege, and or- 
dinances more arbitrary than those which were 
the' immediate cause of the fall of Charles X., 
have gone far to disabuse the public mind on 
this important subject. In proof of this, we 
cannot refer to stronger evidence than is af- 
forded by the leading Whig journal of this city, 
one of the warmest early supports of the Re- 
volution of July, and which is honoured by the 
communications of all the official men in the 



* Sarrans. 



Scottish metropolis. The passage is as ho- 
nourable to their present candour, as their for- 
mer intemperate and noisy declamation in 
favour of democratic insurrection was indica- 
tive of the slender judgment, and limited his- 
torical information, which they bring to bear 
on political questions. It is contained in the 
preface with which the " Caledonian Mercury" 
ushers in to their readers a series of highly in- 
teresting and valuable papers, by a most re- 
spectable eye-witness of the Parisian revolt : 

"It has appeared to us desirable to lay be- 
fore our readers a view of a great event, or 
rather concatenation of events, so different 
from any which they have hitherto been ac- 
customed to have presented to them ; and we 
have been the more easily induced to give in- 
sertion to these papers, because hitherto one 
side of the question has been kept wholly in 
the shade, — and because differing as we do, 
tolo ccpIo, from the author in general political 
principle, we are, nevertheless, perfectly at one 
with him in regard to the real origin or primvm 
mobile of the Revolution of July, as well as the 
motives and character of the chief personages 
who benefited by that extraordinary event. 
The truth is, that, in this country, we prejudged 
the case, and derided before inquiry, upon the re- 
presentations of one side, which had the ad- 
vantage of victory to recommend and accredit 
the story which it deemed it convenient to 
tell: nor — first impressions being proverbially 
strong — has it hitherto been found possible to 
persuade the public to listen with patience to 
any thing that might be alleged in justification, 
or even in extenuation of the party which had 
had the misfortune to play the losing game. 
Of late, however, new light has begun to break 
in upon the public. All have been made sen- 
sible that the Revolution has retrograded ; that 
its movement has been, crab-like, backwards ; 
and that ' the best of republics' has shown it- 
self the ivorst, because the least secure, of actual des- 
potisms ; while the 'throne, surrounded by re- 
publican institutions' — that monster of fancy, 
engendered by the spirit of paradoxical anti- 
thesis — has proved a monster in reality, broken 
down all the fantastic and baseless fabrics by 
which it was encircled, and swept away the 
very traces of the vain restraints imposed upon 
it. The empire, in short, has been recon- 
structed out of the materials cast up by a de- 
mocratical movement; with this difference 
only, that, instead of a Napoleon, we now see 
a Punchinello at the head of it ; and hence the 
same public, which formerly believed Louis 
Philippe to be a sort of Citizen Divinity, now 
discover in that personage only a newly-cre- 
ated despot without any of the accessories or 
advantages which give, even to despotism, 
some hold on public opinion. A reaction has 
accordingly taken place: and men are in con- 
sequence prepared to listen to things against 
which, previously, they, adderwise, closed their 
ears, and remained deaf to the voice of the 
charmer, charm he never so wisely." 

But although from the very first we clearly 
discerned and forcibly pointed out the disas- 
trous effects on the freedom, peace, and tran- 
quillity, first of France, and then of the world, 
which the Parisian revolt was calculated to 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



255 



produce, yet we were not aware of the strong 
grounds in constitutional law and public jus- 
tice there were for the ordinances of Charles X. 
We considered them as a, coup d'etat justified by 
necessity, and the evident peril in which 
Charles stood of losing his crown, and throw- 
ing the nation back to the horrors of revolu- 
tion, if he did otherwise, but as confessedly an 
infraction of the constitution. Upon this sub- 
ject we are now better informed: The great 
and energetic ability of the royalist party has 
been exerted in France to unfold the real 
grounds of the question, and it is now mani- 
fest that the ordinances were not only imperi- 
ously called for by state necessity, but strictly 
justified by the Charter and the constitutional 
law of France. Many of those who now ad- 
mit the lamentable effects of the overthrow of 
Charles X. are not disposed to go this length, 
and are not aware of the grounds on which it 
is rested. Let such persons attend to the fol- 
lowing considerations : — 

The king's defence of the ordinances is con- 
tained in the following proposition : — 

1. That by an article of the Charter, granted 
by Louis XVIII. to the French, and the founda- 
tion of the constitution, power is reserved to 
the king to make such regulations and ordi- 
nances as are necessary for the execution of 
the laws, and the safety of the state. 

2. That matters, through the efforts of the 
Revolutionists, had been brought to such a 
pass, that the ordinances of July were necessary 
" for the execution of the laws, and the safety 
of the state." 

The 14th article in the Charter is in these 
terms — "Reserving to the king the power to 
make regulations and ordinances necessar} r to 
insure the execution of the laws, arid the safety 
of the state." On these words we will not in- 
jure, by attempting to abridge, the argument 
of M. Peyronnet. 

"The alleged treason is a violation of the 
Charter; and how can the Charter have been 
violated by the exercise of a power, of which 
it authorized the use ? It has been asserted re- 
peatedly, that the Charter authorized the king to 
make regulations and ordinances, necessary for 
tin i 'i i ution of the laws, and for the safely of the state. 
' The execution of the laws, and the safety of 
the state ;' these words demand attention. They 
were not written without a motive, nor without 
their signification and force being understood. 
Those who introduced these words into the 
Charter, well knew that they expressed two 
things, between which there was still more 
difference than analogy. 

"If the first words had sufficed, the latter 
would not have been added. It is quite ob- 
vious, that if the framers of the Charter had 
understood that the safety of the state was in 
every case to be provided for only by the execu- 
tion of the laws, these last words would have 
been sufficient. Why give an explanation in 
a special case, of the execution of the laws, after 
having decreed a general rule, including every 
case, whatever it might be? Can it be ima- 
gined, that a legislator could have spoken 
thus, — ' You are to execute the laws : and, 
farther, if the safety of the state be in danger, 
still you will execute the laws V 



"A very obvious necessity demands the ad- 
mission, either, that the power to provide for 
the safety of the state, was independent of the 
power to enforce the execution of the laws ; 
or, that the rules commonly admitted in legis- 
lation must be abandoned, to the extent of as- 
suming that a positive provision, which has a 
known object — an evident meaning — a natural 
and important reference — means, however, no- 
thing by itself, but is confounded and lost, as 
though it did not exist in the preceding provi- 
sion, to which it adds nothing. Lawyers — lit— 
erary men — all men of sense — well know that 
such an assumption is inadmissible. When 
the law is clear, nothing remains but to exe- 
cute it ; and even when it is obscure, the right 
of interpretation only extends to the preferring 
one meaning to another; it does not authorize 
the declaring it of no effect. The interpreter 
of the law does not annihilate it. He expounds 
and gives it life. ' Quoties oratio ambigua est, 
commodissimun est id accipi, quo res de qua agitur 
in tuto sit.' Whenever the meaning of a law is 
doubtful, that interpretation is to be adopted 
which will insure its effect. This is what the 
law pronounces of itself; and this maxim has 
been transmitted to us by the Romans. 

"Besides, what are the true interpreters of 
the law? They are, at first, example; and 
subsequently, the opinions of persons of au- 
thority, expressed at the period of the publica- 
tion of these laws. Let the provisions of the 
Charter be submitted to this double test, and it 
will be seen, that, from the first days of the 
Restoration, the most enlightened, the most es- 
teemed, and the most impartial men, have ex- 
plained this provision as I have done. Of this, 
the Moniteur has collected the proofs. It will 
be farther seen, that in 1814, 1815, and 1816, 
even the founder of the Charter exercised with- 
out dispute the right I refer to, — sometimes as 
regarded the press — sometimes in relation to 
the enemies of the Crown — and sometimes, but 
in an opposite sense, as regarded the elections. 
No one has, however, asserted that the Minis- 
ters who signed the ordinances have been im- 
peached as traitors, and threatened with death. 
On the contrary, they were not only obeyed, 
but applauded. Some have thought the ordi- 
nances of 1815 to have been just; others have 
considered those of 1816 salutary. Approval 
was general, and was given by all parties in 
succession. The measures were various, it is 
true, and could not fail to produce different re- 
sults; but the source whence they sprang was 
the same — the right to dictate them was the 
same ; and thus, whoever has approved of 
these measures, has consequently admitted this 
right." 

M. Peyronnet proceeds to confirm, by exam- 
ples, what is here adduced in regard to the 
power reserved to the king by this clause, and 
the practice which had followed upon it. The 
following instances, in none of ivhich the exer- 
cise of the dispensing power was challenged 
as illegal, afford sufficient evidence of this po- 
sition. 

"In 1822, when the law relating to the cen- 
sorship of the press was proposed, the follow- 
ing declaration was addressed to the Chamber 
of Deputies by its commissioners : 



256 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



" 'la virtue of the 14th article of the Char- 
ter, the king possesses the right to decree by 
an ordinance the measure which is submitted 
to you, and under this view it might be thought 
that this proposition was not necessary. But 
since the government has thought that the in- 
tervention of the Chambers would be attended 
with some advantages, they cannot hesitate to 
consent to it.' 

" In 1828, when a new law was framed to 
abrogate and replace the former one, the com- 
missioners, by their reporter M. Simeon, ad- 
dressed the Chamber of Peers in the following 
terms : 

" 'The 14th article of the Charter reserves 
to the king the power to make the regulations 
and ordinances necessary to insure the execu- 
tion of the laws, and the safety of the state. It 
is not therefore necessary that the law should con- 
firm to him that which he holds from the Charter, 
and from his prerogative as supreme head of 
the state. If any danger be imminent, a dicta- 
torship, to the extent of providing against it, 
devolves upon him during the absence of the 
Chambers. He may also, in case of imminent 
danger, suspend personal liberty.' 

" But all this is only theory. Let us refer to 
acts. The Charter declared, that the laws 
which were not inconsistent with it should re- 
main in force till they should be legally re- 
pealed. (Art. 63.) 

" It declared, also, that the election of depu- 
ties should be made by the electoral colleges, 
the organization of which would be regulated 
by the laws. (Art. 35.) 

"Thus, then, according to the letter of the 
Charter, the electoral laws existing previous 
to 1814, were to continue in force until new 
laws were made. ' New laws,' be it well re- 
membered. 

"What happened, however? On the 13th 
July, 1815, and on the 5th September, 1816, two 
new and different systems of election were 
created in turns ; and they were created by or- 
dinances. 

" W here was the right to act thus found, if 
not in the 14th article of the Charter? 

"But this is little: The Charter declares 
that no one can be elected who is not forty 
years of age, and that no one can be an elector 
under the age of thirty. (Art. 38 and 40.) 

"What happened, however? On the 13th 
of July, 1815, it was decreed that a person 
might exericse the right of an elector at the 
age of twenty-one, and be chosen deputy at 
the age of twenty-five. 

"And how was this decreed? By what act 
was this important change in the Charter ef- 
fected? By a law ? No ! — By an ordinance. 
" Where was the right to act thus found, if 
not in the 14th article of the Charter? 

"This is still but of minor importance: The 
Charter declared that each department should 
return the same number of deputies which it 
had hitherto done. (Art. 36.) What, how- 
ever, happened ? 

"On the 13th July, 1815, the number of depu- 
ties was augmented from two hundred and sixty- 
two to three hundred and ninety-Jive : and by what 
authority ? By an ordinance. 

"Again, what happened? In 1816, when it 



was resolved to return to the number of depu- 
ties fixed by the Charter, instead of five depu- 
ties being returned for the department of l'Ain, 
three deputies for Corsica, and two for the de- 
partment of Finistere, as was the case in 1814, 
— three were allotted to the first, two to the 
second, and four to the third: and by what 
act? By an ordinance. 

" Where was the right to act thus found, if 
not in the 14th article of the Charter? 

"Farther, the Charter declared that those 
persons only could be electors who themselves 
paid direct taxes to the amount of three hun- 
dred francs, and those only be deputies who 
paid them to the extent of one thousand francs. 
(Art. 38 and 40.) 

"However, what happened? In 1816, it was 
decided, that to become an elector, or a deputy, 
the individual need not possess property in 
his own right chargeable with those taxes, but 
that it was sufficient if the requisite sums were 
paid by a wife, a minor child, a widowed 
mother, a mother-in-law, a father-in-law, or a 
father. 

"What farther happened? In 1815, and 
again in 1816, it was decided that members of 
the Legion of Honour might be admitted to 
vote in the minor assemblies of the arrondisse- 
ment, without paying taxes of any kind; and, 
on paying only three hundred francs, in the 
superior assemblies of the departments, where 
only those were entitled to vote, who were as- 
sessed at the highest rate of taxation. 

" How were all these things decreed ? By 
ordinances. And where was the right to act 
thus found? Evidently it existed only in the 
14th article of the Charter. Now, let us re- 
capitulate these facts. A double change of 
system — a double change of numbers — a 
double change as to age — a double change as 
to taxation — a change as to the particular 
rights of three departments. All this without 
any law. A direct formal, and essential en- 
croachment on the articles 35, 36, 38, 40, and 
63, of the Charter. All this without any law ; 
all established by ordinances ; all this by virtue 
of the 14th article ; all this without crime — 
without condemnation — without even accusa- 
tion : and now !" 

These examples are worthy of the most 
serious consideration, and, in truth, are de- 
cisive of this legal question — How is it pos- 
sible to stigmatize that as illegal in 1830, 
which had been exercised to fully as great an 
extent, on more than a dozen different occa- 
sions, from 1815 onwards? How is the change 
on the electoral law in 1815 and 1816 to be 
vindicated? And who ever complained of 
this ? But, above all, attend to the important 
changes introduced in 1815, on the qualifica- 
tion of electors, and the representative body, 
by ordinances. The age of an elector was 
lowered from 30 to 21 years, and of a deputy 
from 40 to 25 ; the number of deputies in- 
creased from 262 to 395, by an ordinance. 
Did the French liberals ever complain of these 
ordinances as illegal? Did they ever object 
to that which declared that the 300 francs a- 
year, which is the qualification for an elector, 
might be paid not only by the elector, but his 
wife, child, mother, mother-in-law, father-in- 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



2o', 



It is quite another question, whether it was 
wise or constitutional to have conferred this 
power on the crown. Suffice it to say, that it 
did possess it; that its exercise had repeatedly 
taken place on many different occasions, with 
the full concurrence and applause of the popu- 
lar party; and therefore that the legality of the 
ordinances is beyond a doubt. 

The question remains, whether the exercise 
of the power was justified by necessity, or 
called for by expedience 1 

Upon this subject, if any doubt existed, it 
has been removed by the events of the last two 
years. No one who contemplates the state of 
France during that period can doubt, that the 
power of the democracy has become too great, 
not merely for royalty, but for freedom ; that 
the balance has been altogether subverted ; and 
that the martial law, arbitrary measures, and 
relentless prosecution of the press, which has 
distinguished the administration of Casimir 
Perier and Marshal Soult, were imperatively 
called for, to restrain the anarchy which was 
rapidly conducting society in France to its 
dissolution. What the power of the demo- 
cracy was — what formidable weapons it pos- 
sessed—how complete was its organization, is 
proved by what it has done. It has subverted 
the most beneficent government that ever ruled 
in France since the days of Clovis; whose 
wisdom and moderation had gone far to close 
the frightful wounds of the Revolution ; which 
gave perfect freedom to individuals, and abso- 
lute protection to property, during the fifteen 
years of its rule ; and the unexampled pros- 
perity resulting from whose administration all 
the anarchy and wretchedness consequent on 
the Revolution of July have not been able alto- 
gether to extinguish. The Revolutionists were 
victorious in the strife; they got a king of 
their own choosing, and a government of their 
own formation ; their journalists were made 
Ministers of State, and the system for which 
they contended established; and what was the 
consequence 1 Why, that out of the triumph 
of the Liberals has arisen such turbulence, 
anarchy, and wretchedness, as rendered it ab- 
solutely necessary for the Liberals themselves 
to re-enact Prince Polignac's ordinances with 
still more arbitrary clauses, and support them 
by a bloody fight in the streets of Paris, and 
the array of " a greater number of armed men," 
as Sarrans tells us, " than combated Prussia 
or Russia at Jena or Austerlitz." This result 
is decisive of the question ; it is the experi- 
mcntum cruris which solves the doubt. It 
proves that Polignac and Charles were correct 
in their view of the terrible nature of the pow- 
er they had to combat; that they foresaw, be- 
fore they occurred, what the progress of events 
was destined to bring forth,' took the measures 
best calculated to prevent them, and erred only 
by not duly estimating the magnitude of the 
physical strength which their adversaries had 
at their disposal. 

On this subject we cannot do better than 
quote the able and eloquent observations of 
the Viscount Saint Chamans: — 

I ed to the 14th article by the ™eT*U,ma™nt^*to 
\ Sittins of Dec. 29, 1830.-Poli K nac, 51, 52. Polijjnac for such a power as is essential to save the remainder 
justly disclaims so arbitrary a power as is here attribut- I of the constitution. 

33 * i 



law, or father 1 Or that which admitted mem- 
bers of the Legion of Honour to vote in the 
minor assemblies without paying any taxes? 
Why were not the ministers impeached who 
signed the ordinances in favour of the Liberal 
party f Not a whisper was heard of their ille- 
gality on any of these occasions. But this is 
the uniform conduct of the Revolutionists in 
all ages and countries, and in all matters, 
foreign and domestic. Whatever is done in 
their favour is lauded to the skies, as the 
height of liberality, wisdom, and justice; 
whatever is aimed at their supremacy, is in- 
stantly stigmatized as the most illegal and op- 
pressive act that ever was attempted by a 
blood-thirsty tyrant. Had the ordinances of 
July, instead of restoring the number of depu- 
ties to something approaching to that fixed by 
the Charter, and restraining the licentiousness 
of the press, been directed to the increase of 
democratic power, they would have been prais- 
ed as the most constitutional act that ever 
emanated from the throne ; and Charles X., 
for the brief period of popularity allotted to 
conceding monarchs, been styled " the most 
popular monarch that ever set on the throne 
since the days of Charlemagne." 

There are many other instances of the exer- 
cise of the same power by the crown. In 
particular, in a report made in 1817 to the 
Chamber of Peers, respecting the jury law, 
which also contained several enactments, it is 
declared, to remove the fears expressed by the 
adversaries of the project of the law, that if 
these fears were realized, " the king would 
have the resource of using the extraordinary 
power provided by the li'h article of the Charter." 
This report was received without opposition 
by the liberal part of the Chamber. Prince 
Polignac has adduced two instances, among a 
host of others which might be adduced, of the 
manner in which these acts of the crown were 
received by the Liberal party in France. " The 
Charter," says the National, "without the 
14th article, would have been an absurdity." 
The founder of the Charter said, and was right 
in saying, " I am willing to make a conces- 
sion ; but not such a concession as would in- 
jure me and mine. If, therefore, experience 
proves that I have conceded too much, I re- 
serve to myself the faculty to revise the constitu- 
tion, and it is that which I express by the 14th 
article. This was perfectly reasonable ; those 
who supported legitimacy and the Restoration, 
were right in insisting that the king was not 
to yield up his sword."* 

An equally decisive testimony was borne by 
a learned writer, in the tribune of the Chamber 
of Deputies, now a minister of France. " When 
the Charter appeared in 1814, what did the 
supreme authority do 1 It took care to put in 
the preamble the word ' octroye,' and in the 
text the 14th article, which conferred the power 
of making ordinances for the safety of the 
state ; that is, he attributed to himself before 
the Charter an anterior right prior to the Char- 
ter, or, in other words, a sovereign, constituent, 
absolute power." f 



258 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



" The Ordinances of July, and the sedition 
which followed them, were no more the cause 
of the Revolution of July than the dismissal 
of M. Neckar, and the storming of the Bastile, 
were the cause of the Revolution of 17S9. I 
see in both these events the first acts of a Re- 
volution, of which the causes had existed long 
before, but not the origin of that Revolution 
itself. You might just as well say that the 
battle of Arbela was the cause of the ruin of 
Darius : as if, when the enemy had invaded 
your territory, and penetrated to the heart of 
your dominions, you had any chance of safety 
by laying down your arms and submitting to 
his terms — as if it was not better to risk a 
struggle which would save you, if it was 
gained, and renders you no worse than you 
were before, if it is lost. Such was Ihe posi- 
tion of Charles X. He is unjustly accused of 
having committed suicide ; but there are many 
others to whom the reproach can with more 
reason be applied. 

"Louis XVIII. committed suicide on his 
race, when he caused his ministers, in 1817, 
to bring forward a democratic laiv for the election 
of Deputies to Parliament, drawn in such a 
manner as gave little chance of success to the real 
friends of the monarchy, and when he created 
sixty Peers to hinder the reparation of that fatal 
step when it was yet time. 

" The Chamber of Peers committed suicide, 
when, with a childish desire for popularity, 
they joined themselves to the Opposition (an 
unnatural union) to overturn the minister, 
who stood out as the last defender of mo- 
narchical and aristocratic principles, and to 
give a triumph to liberal ideas. They have 
received their reward in the overthrow of the 
hereditary Peerage. 

"They committed suicide, the Royalists of 
every shade and description, who enrolled 
themselves under the Liberal banners, from 
whence, after the triumph was completed, they 
were ignominiously expelled. 

"The courtiers committed suicide when 
they weakly joined the Liberals, not seeing 
that the principles of that party are inconsist- 
ent with their existence. 

"The crowd of commercial and industrious 
■persons committed suicide, when, become the 
soldiers and pioneers of Liberalism, they at- 
tacked with all their might, and finally over- 
turned, that constitution which had conferred 
such blessings on them, and prosperity on 
their country, and under which France had 
■enjoyed a prosperity without example. 

"It is in the faults of these parties, in the 
situation of parties anterior to the Ordinances 
which resulted from these faults, that we must 
seek for the causes of the catastrophe, and not 
in the faults of Charles X. or his Ordinances. 
It is evident that the event has not created the 
situation, but only brought it to light; that his 
sceptre did not fall in pieces at the first stroke, 
from being then for the first time assailed, but 
because the blow unfolded the rottenness of 
the heart, brought about by anterior causes." 
— St. Chamans, 3, 4. 

We had begun to underline the parts of this 
striking passage, which bear in an obvious 
manner on the recent events in this country, 



now, alas ! beyond the reach of redemption, 
but we soon desisted. Every word of it ap- 
plies to our late changes ; and demonstrates a 
coincidence between the march of revolution 
in the two countries, which is almost miracu- 
lous. At the distance of about ten years, our 
liberal Tories and revolutionary Whigs have 
followed every one of the steps of the Jacobins 
and Doctrinaires of France. While they were 
hastening down the gulf of perdition at a gal- 
lop, we followed at a canter, and have adopted 
every one of the steps which there rendered the 
downward progress of the Revolution irretriev- 
able, and spread unheard-of misery through 
every part of France. We too have had Roy- 
alists of every shade inclining to liberal ideas ; 
and the courtiers entering into alliance with 
their enemies, and a crowd of commercial and 
manufacturing citizens combining to overturn 
the constitution under which they and their 
fathers had, not for fifteen, but an hundred 
and fifty years, enjoyed unheard-of prosperity ; 
and the Crown bringing forward a new and 
highly democratical system of election ; and 
the concurrence of the Peers forced by a 
threatened creation of sixty members. Hav- 
ing sown the same seed as the French, can we 
hope to reap a different crop 1 May Heaven 
avert from these realms the last and dreadful 
catastrophe to which these measures led on 
the other side of the Channel ! 

With regard to the conduct of Charles X. 
after ascending the throne, the following ac- 
count is given by the same writer: — 

" The goodness of Charles X., his love for 
his people, his beneficence, his affability, his 
piety, his domestic virtues, doubtless have 
placed his private character beyond the reach 
of attack. Let us see whether his public con- 
duct justifies any more the accusations of his 
enemies. 

" On ascending the throne, he resisted the 
natural desire of giving the direction of affairs 
to his political confidants, and, sacrificing his 
private affections to his public duty, he re- 
tained the administration of his deceased bro- 
ther who had raised France to so high a pitch 
of happiness. When, shortly after, public 
opinion, misled by the press, became weary 
of the prosperity of France, and overturned in 
its madness the ministers who had restored 
its prosperity within, and regained its conside- 
ration without, did Charles X. make use of 
any coup d'etat to maintain in his government 
the principles which he deemed necessary to 
the salvation of France t No. He yielded : 
he sacrificed all his own opinions, he changed 
his ministers and his system, and in good faith 
embraced the new course which was pre- 
scribed to him. He conceded every thing that 
was demanded. As the reward of the many 
sacrifices made to opinion, he was promised a 
peaceable, beloved, and cherished existence. 
But bitter experience soon taught him that 
what was conceded passed for nothing, or ra- 
ther was considered only as the means of ob- 
taining fresh concessions; that the party which 
he hoped to have satisfied, multiplied one de- 
mand on another, moved incessantly forward 
from session to session, and evidently would 
not stop till it had fallen with him into the 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



259 



gulf of democracy; that public opinion, that 
is to say, its tyrant, the press, was soon as much 
irritated at the new ministers as it had been 
at those which preceded them; that his go- 
vernment was harassed with as great obsta- 
cles as before ; that the sacrifice made was 
therefore useless, and that the system on 
which, against his better judgment, he had 
entered, instead of being followed by the ad- 
vantages which had been promised, was in 
fact precipitating him into those evils, the 
foresight of which had at first inclined him to 
a contrary system. 

"Charles X., confirmed by that essay in his 
first ideas, reverted then to his own opinions, 



their faces; instead of a blood-thirsty tyrant, 
a beneficent monarch, bravely enduring the 
storms of adversity, was discovered; and be- 
fore the royal family departed for the conti- 
nent, they had secured the interest, and won 
the affection, of all classes of the citizens. 

" Were, then," continues M. St. Chamans, 
"the Ordinances the cause of the catastrophe 
which ensued 1 Yes ! if the Ordinances were 
useless — if the throne and the Constitution 
were not in danger; or if, though in danger, 
they could have been saved without a coup 
d'etat. Not, if they were necessary and una- 
voidable ; if the throne, the dynasty, the Con- 
stitution, were about to perish ; if the illegal 



and the men who shared them ; and, whatever ! attacks of the enemies of the monarchy had 
calumny may assert to the contrary, neither J left the king no other resource but a des- 
those men nor those opinions were contrary j perate effort. What signifies whether you 
to the charter. The real violators of the perish of the operation, or the progress of the 
charter were to be found in the majority of i disease 1 

the Chamber of Deputies; in the 221 who re- | " What was the situation of affairs at the 
fused to respect the constitutional right of the j epoch of the Ordinances 1 On that depends 
monarch to choose his ministers, and who j the solution of the question, 
were resolved to force him to dismiss them, "The Chamber had been dissolved, because 
though they could not allege a single illegal j the majority was hostile; the elections had 
act of which they had been guilty. And, in | sent back a majority still more numerous and 
truth, their administration was perfectly legal \ hostile; the Chamber was to assemble on the 
and constitutional, down to the promulgation ! 3d August. 

of the Ordinances, on which opinions are so I "Charles X. could not govern France with 
much divided, and which necessity alone die- j that Chamber, but by composing a ministry in 
tated to prevent the crown being taken off the j harmony with the majority of its members; 
head of the sovereign. I that is, by assuming nearly the same men, 

"Let the truth then be proclaimed boldly. j who, after the 7th August, formed the cabinet 
Prior to the Ordinances, Charles X. merited of Louis Philippe, and adopting the same 
reproach as little in his public as his private system ; for such a ministry could not have 
life. I may defy his most implacable enemies existed a day without conceding the same 
and his daily libellers, who have with such j democratic demands which were granted in 
fury attacked a fallen victim, to point out one i the modified charter of August 7th. We may 
real grievance, or single illegal act of his I judge, then, of the situation in which Charles 
whole reign. Are there any more reproaches i X. would have been placed, by that in which 
to make to the family who surrounded himl i we now see Louis Philippe. Now, if, in the 
You will find, on the contrary, in them an as- j short space of eighteen months three adminis- 
semblage of all the virtues, of the noblest i trations have been overturned; if the throne 
courage in the extremities of misfortune. If : itself is shaken — without authority, without 
these virtues, these qualities, the inheritance j force, without consideration — what must have 
of a noble race, are lost to us by our ingrati- j been the fate of the royalty of Charles X.] If 
tude, they are at least springing up again in j the liberal party has acted in this manner by a 
another generation ; they are yet growing for | king whom they regarded as their own — the 
France." — St. Chamans, 7, 9. darling of their own creation, and who by his 

In this particular, our own experience of the j conduct and his personal qualities possessed 
illustrious exiles in this city fully corroborates ] all the sympathies of the revolutionary party; 
the testimony of the French royalists. Never, j if, in spite of so many titles to their favour, 
in truth, did simple, unobtrusive virtue work a i that prince has been obliged to throw them out 
more surprising change in favourof any family two or three administrations as morsels to de- 
than that of Charles X. did in the opinion of this j vour ; if the journals, the caricatures, the tu- 
city. When he first arrived in Edinburgh, he i mults, have troubled his days and his nights; if 
was regarded by the great majority of the citi- he has been obliged to deliver up to them even 

the arms of his race, and to degrade his own 
palace by effacing the fleur-de-lis ; if they have 



zens, deluded by the revolutionary press, as a 
blood-thirsty tyrant, who took a pleasure in 
cutting down the people by discharges of 
grape-shot, and was intent only on the most 
arbitrary proceedings. His followers took no 
pains whatever to disabuse the public mind; 
not a pamphlet, nor a newspaper paragraph, 
issued from Holyrood ; they lived in retire- 
ment, and were known only to a limited circle 
by the elegance of their manners, and to all 
by the extent and beneficence of their chari- 
ties, and the sincere and unaffected discharge 
of their religious duties. By degrees the mask 



thus treated their friend, their chosen prince, 
their citizen king, is it conceivable that they 
would have respected the crown of a king, the 
object of their hatred and jealousy, under 
which they would have incessantly trembled 
for concessions evidently extorted by force ? 
Who can doubt that in these circumstances 
the throne of Charles X. would have perished 
some months sooner than that of Louis 
Philippe! Charles X. delivered over to a 
ministry and a chamber chosen from his ene- 



placcd by the Revolutionists dropped from | mies, would have found himself nearly in the 



260 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



same position as Louis XVI. in 1792. The 

result would have been the same. If, then, the 
danger of destruction awaited him equally, 
whichever course he adopted, it was far better 
to perish when combating like a king of 
France than in weakly yielding. An open 
strife offered at least the chance of safety ; con- 
cessions offered none." — Si. Chamans, 11, 12. 

"And that necessity is a sufficient ground for 
such violent measures as coups d'etat, cannot 
surely be denied by those whose subsequent 
conduct has been entirely founded on that 
basis. What authorized them to revolt against 
the authority of the king'? They answer, 
necessity, in default of constitutional means 
of resistance. Who gave them a right to 
change the dynasty? They answer, necessity. 
Who authorized them to overturn the charter 
sworn to by all the French 1 Necessity. Who 
authorized them to mutilate the chamber of 
peers, and to change into a life-rent their rights 
of eternal property] They answer, necessity. 
Necessity is their sole law: and, if necessity 
justifies measures evidently calculated to over- 
turn, not only the throne but the constitution, 
with what reason can it be pretended that it 
does not justify a measure intended to pre- 
serve both V— Ibid. 18, 19. 

Saint Chamans gives an account of the real 
causes of the Revolution of July. These are, 
the democratic law of Feb. 5, 1817, regarding 
the elections; the licentious press; and the 
centralization of all the powers of France in 
Paris. This part of the subject is of the ut- 
most importance, and is treated by our author 
with his usual ability. We shall endeavour 
only to do justice to the subject in our trans- 
lation. 

"Two causes have, in an especial manner, 
precipitated the monarchy into the abyss from 
which there was no escape. These were the 
license of the daily press, and the democratic 
law of elections. It was against them that 
the Ordinances were directed. 

" I will not here repeat what I have often 
advanced in regard to the periodical press. I 
will only say, that ever since it has been unre- 
strained, it has engaged in a battle of life and 
death with the authority, whatever it was, 
which held the reins of government: that it 
stabbed to the heart the constitutional monar- 
chy of 1791, established in the first fervour of 
the Revolution; that it afterwards slew the 
Girondists, who had overthrown the monar- 
chy ; that it itself was crushed on three differ- 
ent occasions, first by the Reign of Terror, 
then by the cannons of the 13th Vendemiaire. 
when Napoleon overthrew the sections, and 
again by the transportations which followed 
the 18th Fructidor; that having reappeared 
after an interval of twenty years, it destroyed 
the ministry of 1819, and shook the throne of 
the Restoration; that it overturned succes- 
sively the ministry of Villele, of Martignac, 
and after that at one fell swoop the ministry, 
the throne, the charter, and the constitutional 
monarchy; that since that time it has slain 
the ministry of the Duke de Broglio and Gui- 
zot, and of M. Lafitte; the two last in a few 
months, and the third has no better lease of 
life than the popular throne. That is to say, 



during twenty years that the press has been 
unfettered since 1789, it has uniformly come 
to pass, that in a short time it has either over- 
turned the authority of government, or been 
overturned by it, through a violent coup d'etat. 
It was the shock of these opposing powers, 
each of which felt that its existence could be 
secured only by the destruction of its enemy, 
which produced the terrible struggle and the 
catastrophe of 1830. To appreciate, in a 
word, all the force of that demon-like power, 
it is sufficient to recall to recollection that the 
press succeeded in a few months in making 
the weak and unfortunate Louis XVI. pass for 
a blood-thirsty tyrant; and that latterly it 
created that strong disaffection, which, in the 
crisis of their fate, Charles X. and his noble 
family experienced in the population of Paris 
and its environs ; the very men who were 
daily witnesses of their virtues, and literally 
overwhelmed with their benefactions. 

"As to the law of elections, of February, 1817, 
it was framed in the true spirit of democracy ; 
the necessary result of which was, that it de- 
livered the whole influence in the state into the 
hands of the middling class, incapable of any 
practical instruction in public affairs, passion- 
ately devoted to change and disorder, from which 
it hopes to obtain its elevation to the head of 
affairs, as if it ever could maintain itself there. 
That law annulled at once the influence both of 
the higher classes intrusted in the preservation 
of order, and of the lower, ever ready, no doubt, 
to disturb the public peace, by the prospect of 
pillage, but who can never be led into long 
disorders, by the dream of governing the state. 
It follows, from these principles, that the law 
of February 5, 1817, whose enactments regu- 
lated three-fifths of the electors, gave the ma- 
jority, and, by consequence, the control of the 
State, precisely to the class the most dangerous to 
the public order, and ever disposed to support 
revolutions, from the belief that it will benefit 
by their progress." — St. Chamans, 21, 22. 

"The revolution, long previously prepared, 
broke out on occasion of the Ordinances, which 
were directed to the coercion of the press, and 
an alteration on the law of elections. The 
press could have been placed under no re- 
straints if the elections had returned a Cham- 
ber of Deputies, enemies alike to order and 
public repose. It was the law of the elections, 
therefore, that alone rendered indispensable the 
employment of a violent remedy. The law 
of the election of 5th February, 1817, with the 
ordinance of 5th September following on it, 
and the creation of Peers which was its re- 
sult — these were the true causes of the Revolu- 
tion of 1830, and these causes existed before 
the reign of Charles X. He therefore is not 
to be blamed for it. If the throne has perished, 
it is not because the battle was engaged, but 
• because it was lost. It was reduced to such a 
state, that nothing but a victory gained could 
have saved it. 

"These were the causes which directly pro- 
duced the catastrophe; but it would neither 
have been so complete nor so rapid, had it not 
been for the effects of that absurd centraliza- 
tion, of which the Constituent Assembly pre- 
pared the scourge, by dividing France into so 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



261 



many departments, nearly equal, and breaking 
down all the ties of the provinces cemented 
by time. That universal levelling paved the 
way for tyranny, by concentrating the whole 
moral strength of the nation in Paris. The 
universal destruction of the provinces has 
deprived France of all internal strength ; the 
whole remainder of the country has been re- 
duced to mimic the movements of Paris, and 
ape its gestures, like a reflection in a glass. 
Since that period, the provinces, or rather the 
departments, have not had a thought or a wish, 
but what they received from Paris ; they have 
changed masters ten times, without knowing 
why, almost always against their will, begin- 
ning with the 10th August, 1792, and ending 
with the 29th July, 1830. How, in fact, can an 
eighty-sixth part of France organize any resist- 
ance to the central authority ? The neighbour- 
ing departments first receive the impulse, which 
is instantly communicated like an electric 
shock to the others. All France being con- 
centrated in Paris, there is neither force nor 
opinion beyond that limited spot. The mo- 
ment that Paris falls, the whole kingdom in- 
stantly falls under the yoke of the stranger; 
the vast monarchy of France is reduced to the 
circuit of a single city. It was not thus with 
old France. A king of England reigned six- 
teen years in Paris, but the provinces resisted 
and saved France. Guise and the League, and 
latterly the Fronde, chased the king from Paris ; 
but the provinces did not abandon their sove- 
reign, and not only preserved his throne, but 
led him back in triumph to Paris. 

" What a deplorable change is now exhi- 
bited 1 The great centralization of Paris is 
repeated in detail in the little centralization of 
the chief towns of the departments, which 
communicate their movement to all the dis- 
tricts of which they are the head. In each of 
these, a few of the rabble, headed by half a 
dozen advocates, make a little revolution, 
always following the model of the great one. 
This is what has been seen in our days, but 
never before in so extraordinary and disgrace- 
ful a manner. Who would believe it? A few 
thousand workmen and students, who had ob- 
tained the mastery in Paris by means of a 
sedition, changed the colours of the nation, 
and hoisted the tri-colour flag. The depart- 
ments instantly covered themselves with white, 
blue, and red. Throughout all Fiance they 
changed their colours, without knowing whose 
they were to mount; whether those of a re- 
public, a military despotism, or a democratic 
government. They knew nothing of all this ; 
but, as mobs must have a rallying cry, they 
called out, Viva la Chartc, when they were sup- 
porting a faction which had overturned it. If 
you asked them what they wanted, what they 
complained of, whom they served, what they 
proposed to themselves 1 They answered, ' We 
will tell you when the next courier arrives 
from Paris.' They are in transports, and ready 
to lay down their life — for whom ? Why, for 
the ruler whose name shall be proclaimed 
from the first mail-coach. Unhappily this is 
no pleasantry ; the tri-colour was received in 
several departments many days before they 
knew what sort of government it was to bring 



them. Thirty or forty shopkeepers in Paris 
had as many millions in our noble France at 
their disposal, as if it were a matter which 
they could mould according to their will. They 
made use of our illustrious country as a sta- 
tuary dees of a block of marble, who asks 
himself, 'Shall I make a god, a devil, or a 
table V Be he whom he may, it is certain that 
he is the very man whom the provinces would 
most desire, and whom they would instantly 
love with transport the moment he is on the 
throne. Who can be surprised after that, if 
these revolutionary improvisatores are not 
supported by the same profound affections 
which ancient habits and old feelings have im- 
planted in the hearts. How disgraceful to the 
age to see our countrymen, and precisely those 
amongst them who are most vociferous in 
support of liberty, make themselves the mute 
slaves of Paris, and accept with their eyes 
shut whoever is crowned there, whether he be 
a Nero, a Caligula, or a Robespierre !" — Cha- 
rnans, 24 — 27. 

These observations are worthy of the most 
serious aitention. The utter and disgraceful 
state of thraldom in which France is kept by 
Paris — in other words, by twenty or thirty in- 
dividuals commanding the press there — has 
long been proved, and was conspicuous through 
all the changes of the Revolution; and without 
doubt, the destruction of all the provincial 
courts, and the annihilation of the whole an- 
cient distinctions of the provinces, has gone 
far to break down and destroy the spirit of the 
remainder of France. But the evil lies deeper 
than in the mere centralization of all the in- 
fluences of France in Paris ; its principal 
cause is to be found in the destruction of the 
higher ranks of the nobility, which took place 
during the first Revolution. In no part of 
France are there now to be found any great or 
influential proprietors, who can direct or 
strengthen public opinion in the provinces, or 
create any counterpoise to the overwhelming 
preponderance of the capital. Here and there 
may be found an insulated proprietor who lives 
on his estates; but, generally speaking, that 
class is extinct in the provinces, and so far 
from being able to resist the influence of Paris, 
its peasant landholders are unable to withstand 
the ascendant of their prefect, or the chief 
town of their department. Napoleon was per- 
fectly aware of this. He knew well, that in 
consequence of the destruction of the higher 
orders, regulated freedom was impossible in 
France, and he therefore signalized his first 
accession to the throne by the creation of a 
new order of noblesse, who, he flattered him- 
self, would supply the place of that which had 
been destroyed. Imperfectly as a nobilit}', for 
the most part destitute of property, can supply 
the place of one who centre in themselves the 
great mass of the national property, it yet con- 
tributed something to preserve the balance of 
society; and of this the great prosperitv and 
regulated freedom of the Restoration afforded 
decisive evidence. But this did not answer 
the purpose of the revolutionists. It raised 
few of them to supreme power; the editors of 
journals were not yet ministers of state, and 
therefore the"' never ceased agitating the pub- 



262 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



lie mind, and spreading the most false and 
malicious reports concerning all men in au- 
thority, till at length they succeeded in over- 
turning, not only the throne, but the hereditary 
peerage, and have thus destroyed the last bul- 
wark which stood between the Parisian mob 
and despotism, over the whole of France. 
Such is the unseen but resistless manner in 
which Providence counteracts the passions 
of individuals, and brings out of the furnace of 
democracy the strong government, which is 
ultimately destined to coerce it, and restore 
society to those principles which can alone 
insure the safety or happiness of its members. 

Let us now hear M. St. Chamans on the ef- 
fects of that great triumph of democracy. 

"Let us now attend to the deplorable effects 
of the Revolution of 1830. To riches has suc- 
ceeded misery ; commerce, nourishing when 
the Glorious Days began, is now in the depth 
of suffering; industry, then so active, is lan- 
guishing; the bankers, so splendid before that 
catastrophe, now attract the public attention 
by nothing but the eclat of their bankruptcies. 
Before it, consumption was continually in- 
creasing; order and tranquillity reigned uni- 
versally in France; the public revenue was 
abundant, and easily collected: since it, con- 
sumption has greatly decreased; disorder and 
disquietude trouble every man in the country; 
the public receipts are constantly diminish- 
ing, and becoming of more difficult collection. 
Contrast the moderate imposts which were 
sufficient when peace was certain, with the 
extraordinary expenses and total deficiency of 
the ordinary receipts which have taken place 
since the Revolution disturbed the peace of 
Europe, and the disastrous effects of this ca- 
lamitous event will distinctly appear. 

"Instead of the perfect order which under 
the Restoration prevailed in France, we now 
see universally violence going on against 
churches, priests, juries, electors, and inof- 
fensive citizens ; against the collectors of the 
public revenue, their registers and furniture; 
against the organs of the press, and the press 
itself; royalty is obliged everywhere to efface 
the word ' Royal ;' government addressing to 
the departments telegraphic despatches, which 
the prefects are in haste to affix on their walls, 
and which the public read with avidity; the 
great, the important news is, that on such a 
day, the 14th or 28th of July, Paris was tranquil. 
Paris was tranquil ! Why, tranquillity was so 
usual under the former reign, that no one 
thought of mentioning it, more than that the 
sun had risen in the morning. 

"Nor have the effects of the Three Glorious 
Days been less conspicuous in every other de- 
partment. We see regiments, ill-disciplined, 
acting according to their fancy; sometimes 
raging with severity against the insurrections; 
sometimes regarding, without attempting to 
suppress them; sometimes openly joining 
their violence ; the theatres alternately shock- 
ing religion, its ministers, manners, and public 
decency; the minister opposing nothing to 
that torrent of insanity, though he knows 
where to apply the scissors of the censorship 
when the license extends to his own actions." 
Ibid. 31, 32. 



" Thus the Revolution, without having given 
us one of the ameliorations so loudly demand- 
ed by the Liberals, has exhibited no other re- 
sult but anarchy and misery; the one the ob- 
ject of well-known terror to every friend to his 
country, the other universal suffering. It is 
needless to give any proofs of this state of de- 
cay and suffering; we have only to open our 
eyes to see it; all the world knows it, and not 
the least the authors of the Revolution of July ; 
not only those who have been its dupes, but 
those who have been enriched by it, (if indeed 
it has benefited any one,) make no attempt to 
conceal the state of anarchy and disquietude 
into which France is plunged ; on the contrary, 
they seek to turn it to their profit, by constantly 
exhibiting before the public eye a dismal per- 
spective of evils suspended over our heads — 
disorder, anarchy, a republic, pillage, popular 
massacres, in fine, the Reign of Terror. They 
do not pretend that their rule can give us pros- 
perity, but only that it stems the torrent of ad- 
versity. 

"These disastrous consequences are ma- 
turing throughout France with a frightful ra- 
pidity. The inhabitants of Paris, and possibly 
the government, are not aware of the extent to 
which the principles of anarchy have spread 
in every part of France. They believe that 
the earth is undermined only where explosions 
have taken place, but they are in a mistake ; 
it is everywhere, and on all sides, a boulcverse- 
ment is threatened. Certainly, if any thing is 
more deplorable than the present state of 
things, it is the future, which to all appearance 
is in store for us. 

" Discord and anarchy have penetrated 
everywhere ; into most of the regiments of the 
army, into almost all the departments of 
France. In the army, it is well known that 
the non-commissioned officers have more au- 
thority than the officers ; in the villages, the 
electors of the magistrates and municipal 
councils, with the officers of the National 
Guard, have everywhere created two parties, 
and distracted every thing. The source of 
their discord is deeper than any political con- 
tests ; it is the old struggle of the poor against 
the rich; it is the efforts of the democracy in 
waistcoats, trying to subvert the intolerable 
aristocracy of coats. 

" The disastrous effects of the Revolution of 
1830 have not been confined to political sub- 
jects. To complete the picture of our interior 
condition, it is necessary to add that anarchy 
has spread not only into the state, but into re- 
ligion, literature, and the theatres, for it will 
invariably be found that disorder does not con- 
fine itself to one object; that the contagion 
spreads successively into every department of 
human thought. It was reserved for the lights 
of the 19th century to draw an absurd and in- 
credible religion from the principle that 'la- 
bour is the source of riches.' The first conse- 
quence they deduce is, that there is no one use- 
ful in the world but he who labours ; those who 
do not are useless: The second, that all the 
good things of this world should belong to 
those who are the most useful, that is the day- 
labourers. M. St. Simon thence concludes that 
a shoemaker is more useful to society than the 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



263 



Duchess d'Angouleme. He never hesitated as 
to his divine mission, and gave himself out for 
the prophet of a new religion, the high priest 
of a new church. 

"In literature what a chaos of new and ex- 
travagant ideas — what a torrent of absurd re- 
volting madness has burst forth in a short pe- 
riod! It is especially during the last eighteen 
months, that all men of reflection have become 
sensible of the reality of our state of perfection ; 
they have seen that the inefficiency of our lite- 
rary and political character is at least equal to 
their pride, and nothing more can be said of 
them. 

"One would imagine, in truth, that Provi- 
dence had intentionally rendered the triumph of the 
Revolutionists so sudden and complete, expressly in 
order to open the eyes of those by a new example, to 
whom the first would not svffur. Nothing has con- 
tended against them but the consequence of 
their own principles, and yet where are they] 
They have declaimed for fifteen years against 
the undue preponderance of the royal authori- 
ty, and the want of freedom ; and yet they have 
proved by their actions that they could take 
nothing from that authority, and add nothing 
to that freedom, without plunging us into anar- 
chy. Follow attentively their reign — their own 
principles have been sufficient to destroy them, 
without the intervention of a human being. 
The first ministry, M. Guizot and the Duke de 
Broglio, had the favour of the king, and of the 
majority in both chambers. Under the Resto- 
ration, a ministry could never have been over- 
turned which stood in such a situation; but 
nevertheless it did not exist three months ; 
without being attacked it perished; disap- 
peared in the midst of a tumult. The repres- 
sion of that disorder was the nominal, the prin- 
ciples of the government itself the real cause. 
The same causes overthrew in a few months 
more the succeeding ministry. The adminis- 
tration of Casimir Perier had also the support 
of the king and of the chambers, and no one 
attacked it; but nevertheless it was compelled 
to purchase a disgraceful and ephemeral exist- 
ence, by the suppression of the hereditary 
peerage. Such is the state of this government ; 
with all the elements of force it is incapable of 
governing; with 500,000 men, and an annual 
budget of 1500,000,000, (64,000,000/.,) which it 
has at its disposal, it is not obeyed. At Paris, 
nothing has occurred but revolt upon revolt, 
which could be suppressed only by abandoning 
to their fury the Cross, the emblem of Chris- 
tianity, the palace of the Archbishop, and the 
arms of the throne; while in the provinces in- 
surrections have broken out on all sides, some- 
times against the authority of the magistrates, 
sometimes with their concurrence, which have 
led to such a stoppage of the revenue, as has 
led to the contraction of debt to the amount of 
20,000,000/. a year. 

"Whence is it, that with the same elements 
from whence Charles X. extracted so much 
prosperity, and maintained such perfect peace, 
nothing can be produced under Louis Philippe 
but misery and disorder'! It is impossible to 
blink the question ; it is with the same capital 
that industry and commerce are perishing; with 
the same manufactures that you cannot find 



employment for your workmen; with the same 
ships that your merchants are starving; with 
the same revenues that you are compelled to 
sell the royal forests, contract enormous loans, 
pillage the fund laid aside for the indemnity 
of individuals, and incessantly increase the 
floating debt; that it is with peace both with- 
in and without that you are obliged to aug- 
ment the army, and restore all the severity of 
the conscription. How is it that the ancient 
dynasty preserved us from so many misfor- 
tunes, and the new one has brought us such 
terrible scourges 1 I will explain the cause. 

"Confidence creates this prosperity of na- 
tions. Disquietude and apprehension cause 
it to disappear. Security, for the future, given 
or taken away, produces activity or languor, 
riches or misery, tranquillity or trouble. You 
have made your election for the wrong side of 
that alternative, when instead of Right you 
substitute Might: because Right, which never 
changes, bears in itself all the elements of 
stability, while Power, which changes every 
day, brings home to every breast the feeling 
of instability. I know well, that to the present 
triumph of power its leaders strive to annex 
an idea of right ; but it will be just as easy, 
when the next heave of the revolutionary 
earthquake displaces the present authority, to 
clothe that which succeeds it with a similar 
title to permanent obedience. Every succes- 
sive party in its turn can rest its pretensions 
to sovereignty on the authority of the People. 
On the other hand, our right of succession 
depends on an immovable basis. If Charles 
X. or Henry V. is on the throne, every one 
knows that no person can claim the crown on 
the same title as that by which they held it: 
but under the present government, how is it 
possible to avoid the conviction, that if it 
pleases 300 persons at Metz or Grenoble to 
proclaim a republic, or 300 others at Toulouse 
or Bordeaux, Henry V., and if a general stupor, 
arising from the weakness of each of the de- 
partments taken singly, prevents any effectual 
resistance, the new government will immedi- 
ately acquire the same title to obedience as 
that which now fills the throne?" — St. Cha- 
?nans, 57, 58. 

" It is therefore in the principle on which the 
government is founded, that we must look for 
the causeof our suffering and our ruin. If to this 
cause we add the consequences, not less power- 
ful, of a democratic constitution, that is, to an 
organized anarchy, we may despair of the 
safety of our country, if it is not destroyed by 
the seeds of destruction which such a govern- 
ment carries in its bosom. In no country, and 
in no age, has democracy made a great state 
prosper, or established it in a stable manner; 
and even though it should become inured to 
the climate elsewhere, it would always prove 
fatal in France. The foundation of the French 
character is vanity; and that feeling which, 
under proper direction, becomes a noble desire 
for illustrators, which has been the source of 
our military glory, and of our success in so 
many different departments, is an invincible 
bar to our essays in democracy, because every 
one is envious of the superiority of his neigh- 
bour, conceives himself qualified for every 



264 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



thing, and pretends to every situation." — 
Ibid. 60. 

"The Revolution of 1830 has lighted anew 
the torch of experience on many controverted 
points, and I appeal with confidence upon them 
to the many men of good faith who exist among 
our adversaries. They seek like us the good 
of our common country, and the welfare of 
humanity; they hold that in the Charter there 
was too little political power conferred upon 
the people. Let them judge now, for the proof 
has been decisive. They Avill find that on 
every occasion, without one exception, in 
which political power, unrestrained by strict 
limits, has been conferred upon the people, 
personal liberty had been destroyed: that the latter 
has lost as much as the former has gained. 
Such an extension of political power is no- 
thing but democracy or supreme authority 
lodged in the hands of the people. Reflect 
upon the fate of personal freedom under the 
democratic constitutions which promised us 
the greatest possible extension of individual 
liberty. Was there liberty under the Consti- 
tuent Assembly, for those who were massacred 
in the streets, and whose heads they carried on 
the ends of pikes ? Was there liberty for the 
seigniors whose chateaux they burnt, and who 
saved their lives only by flight? Was there 
liberty for those who were massacred at 
Avignon, or whom the committee of Jacobins 
tore from the bosoms of their families to con- 
duct to the guillotine! Was there liberty for 
the King, who was not permitted to move be- 
yond the barriers of Paris, nor venture to 
breathe the fresh air at the distance of a league 
from the city! No, there was liberty only for 
their oppressors : the only freedom was that 
which the incendiaries, jailers, and assassins 
enjoyed. 

" Since the Revolution of July, has there 
been any freedom for the clergy, who do not 
venture to show themselves in the streets of 
Paris, even in that dress which is revered by 
savage tribes ; for the Catholics, who can no 
longer attend mass but at midnight ; for the 
Judges, who are threatened in the discharge 
of their duties by the aspirants for their places ; 
for the Electors, whose votes are overturned 
with the urns which contain them, and who 
return lacerated and bleeding from the place 
of election; for the Citizens arbitrarily thrust 
out of the National Guard; for the Archbishop 
of Paris, whose house was robbed and plun- 
dered with impunity, at the very moment when 
the ministers confessed in the chambers they 
could allege nothing against him; for the 
officers of all grades, even the generals ex- 
pelled from their situations at the caprice of 
their inferiors ; for the curates of churches, 
when the government, trembling before the 
sovereign multitude, close the churches to 
save them from the profanation and sacking 
of the mob; for the King himself, condemned 
by their despotism, to lay aside the arms of 
his race?" 

"These evils have arisen from confounding 
personal with political liberty; a distiction 
■ which lies at the foundation of these matters. 

"I call personal freedom the right to dispose, 



without molestation, of one's person and es- 
tate, and be secure that neither the one nor 
the other will be disquieted without your con- 
sent. That liberty is an object of universal in- 
terest ; its preservation the source of universal 
solicitude. I support the extension of that 
species of liberty to the utmost extent that 
society can admit; and I would carry it to a 
much greater length than ever has been im- 
agined by our democrats. I would have every 
one's property held sacred; his person and 
estate inviolable, without the consent of his 
representatives, or the authority of the law ; 
absolute security against forced service of any 
kind, or against either arrest or punishment, 
but under the strongest safeguard, for the 
protection of innocence. 

" The other species of liberty, called Politi- 
cal Liberty, is an object of interest to the great 
body of the citizens ; it consists in the right of 
taking a part in the government of the state. 
It cannot affect the great body, because in every 
country the immense majority can influence 
government neither by their votes nor their 
writings. This latter kind of liberty should 
be restrained within narrow limits, for experi- 
ence proves it cannot be widely extended with- 
out destroying the other." 

These observations appear to be as novel as 
they are important. They are not, strictly 
speaking, new; for in this Magazine for Feb- 
ruary, 1830,* the same principles are laid down 
and illustrated; and this furnishes another 
proof, among the many which might be col- 
lected, of the simultaneous extrication of the 
same original thought, in different countries at 
the same time, from the course of political 
events. But to any one who calmly and dis- 
passionately considers the subject, it must be 
manifest that they contain the true principle 
on the subject. The difference, as St. Cha- 
mans says, between personal and political lib- 
erty, or, as we should say in this country, be- 
tween Freedom and Democracy, is the most 
important distinction which ever was stated; 
and it is from confounding these two different 
objects of popular ambition, that all the misery 
has arisen, which has so often attended the 
struggle for popular independence, and that 
liberty has so often been strangled by its own 
votaries. 

To produce the greatest amount of personal 
freedom and security with the smallest degree 
of political power in the lower classes ; to 
combine the maximum of liberty with the mi- 
nimum of democracy, is the great end of good 
government, and should be the great object of 
the true patriot in every age and country. 
There is no such fatal enemy to Freedom as 
Democracy; it never fails to devour its off- 
spring in a few years. True liberty, or the 
complete security of persons, thoughts, pro- 
perty, and actions, in all classes, from injury 
or oppression, neverexisted three months under 
an unrestrained Democracy ; because the worst 
of tyrannies is a multitude of tyrants. The 
coercion of each class of society by the others ; 



* French Revolution, No. 2. February, 1830, written 
by the author. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



265 



of the impetuosity and vehemence of the po- 
pulace and their demagogues by the steadiness 
and weight of the aristocracy ; of the ambi- 
tion and oppression of the aristocracy by the 
vigour and independence of the commons, is 
indispensable to the equilibrium of govern- 
ment and the preservation of freedom; but it 
is precisely the state of things which the re- j 
volutionists will ever assail with most vehe- | 
mence, because it affords the most effectual j 
coercion to their passions and despotic ambi- 1 
tion. The spirit of democracy, that keen and ' 
devouring element which has produced, and is 
producing, such ravages in the world, is to the i 
political what fire is to domestic life. Politi- j 
cal freedom cannot exist without it, and when I 
properly regulated, it vivifies and improves 
every department of society ; but if once al- 
lowed to get ahead, if not confined within iron 
bars, it will instantly consume the fabric in 
which it is placed. 

Napoleon has left the following picture of 
the manner in which freedom was devoured 
by democracy, during the first French Revolu- 
tion : — " Liberty," said he, " was doubtless the 
first cry of the people when the Revolution 
arose ; but that was not what they really de- 
sired. The first lightning of the Revolution 
showed what talents then existed, which the 
levelling principle would restore to society for 
the advantage and glory of the state. Thus it 
was equality which the French people always 
desired; and to tell the truth, liberty hath never 
existed since it was proclaimed. For the proper 
definition of liberty is the power of freely ex- 
ercising all our faculties ; and with the excep- 
tion of some speeches which the orators of the 
sections were allowed to make in 1795, show 
me a period when the people were at liberty to 
say or do what they wished since 1789? Was 
it when the crowds of women and malecon- 
tents besieged the Convention 1 Begone ; think 
of your business, said they ; and yet these poor 
people only asked for bread. Will any one 
pretend that the years 1793 or 1794 were the 
eras of freedom I Under the Directory, no one 
dared to open their mouth; and after the 18th 
Fructidor in 1797, a second Reign of Terror 
arose. Never have the people, even under 
Louis XI. or Cardinal Richelieu, or in the most 
despotic states, had less liberty than during the 
whole period which has elapsed since the first revo- 
lution broke out. What France always wished, 
what she still wishes, is equality; in other 



words, the equal partition of the means of ris- 
ing to glory and distinction in the state."* 

This lesson would not suffice. The revolu- 
tionists saw their despotic rule melting away 
under the just and equal sway of the Bourbons, 
and therefore they inflamed the public mind 
till they got their government overthrown. 
Despotism of one kind or another instantly re- 
turned : that of the National Guard, the Pari- 
sian Emeutes, or Marshal Soult's cannoniers, 
and liberty has been destroyed by the dema- 
gogues who roused the people in its name. 
Thus it ever has been ; thus it ever will be to 
the end of time. Individuals may be instructed 
by history or enlightened by reflection ; the 
great masses of mankind will never learn wis- 
dom but from their own suffering. 

This distinction between individual freedom 
and political power, between liberty and demo- 
cracy, is the great point of separation between 
the Whigs and Tories. The Conservatives 
strive to increase personal freedom to the ut- 
most degree, and to effect that they find it in- 
dispensable to restrain the efforts of its worst 
enemies, the democracy. The Whigs attend 
only to the augmentation of popular power, 
and in so doing they instantly trench on civil 
liberty. When were persons, property, life, 
and thoughts, more free, better protected or 
secured, than in Great Britain from 1815 to 
1830, the days when the Democracy was re- 
strained 1 When have they been so ill secured 
since the time of Cromwell, as during the last 
two years, illuminated as they have been by 
the flames of Bristol, and the conflagration of 
Jamaica, the days of democratic ascendency? 
Ireland, at present under the distracting rule 
of O'Connell, the demagogue, is the prototype 
of the slavery to which we are fast driving, 
under the guidance of the Whigs : England, 
from 1815 to 1830, the last example of the 
freedom from which we are receding, estab- 
lished by the Tories. What farther evils the 
farther indulgence of this devouring principle 
is to produce, we know not, though experience 
gives us little hopes of amendment till we have 
gone through additional suffering; but of this 
we are well assured, that the time will come 
when these truths shall have passed into 
axioms, and experience taught every man of 
intelligence, that the assassins of freedom are 
the supporters of democratic power. 



* Napoleon, en Duchesse Abrantes, vii. 169, 170. 



34 



266 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



THE PALL OF TURKEY.* 



The long duration and sudden fall of the 
Turkish Empire is one of the most extraordi- 
nary and apparently inexplicable phenomena 
in European history. The decay of the Otto- 
man power had been constantly the theme of 
historians; their approaching downfall, the 
unceasing subject of prophecy for a century; 
but yet the ancient fabric still held out, and 
evinced on occasions a degree of vigour which 
confounded all the machinations of its enemies. 
For eighty years, the subversion of the empire 
of Constantinople had been the unceasing 
object of Moscovite ambition : the genius of 
Catherine had been incessantly directed to 
that great object; a Russian prince was christ- 
ened after the last of the Palceologi expressly 
to receive his throne, but yet the black eagle 
made little progress towards the Danube; the 
Mussulman forces arrayed on its banks were 
still most formidable, and a host arrayed under 
the banners of the Osmanleys, seemingly ca- 
pable of making head against the world. For 
four years, from 1808 to 1812, the Russians 
waged a desperate war with the Turks; they 
brought frequently an hundred and fifty, some- 
times two hundred thousand men into the 
field; but at its close they had made no sensi- 
ble progress in the reduction of the bulwarks 
of Islamism: two hundred thousand Mussul- 
mans had frequently assembled round the ban- 
ners of the Prophet; the Danube had been 
stained with blood, but the hostile armies still 
contended in doubtful and desperate strife on 
its shores; and on the glacis of Roudschouk, 
the Moscovites had sustained a bloodier defeat 
than they ever received from the genius of 
Napoleon. In the triumph of the Turks at 
that prodigious victory, the Vizier wrote exult- 
ingly to the Grand Seignior, that such was the 
multitude of the Infidel heads which he had 
taken, that they would make a bridge for the 
souls of the Faithful from earth to heaven. 

But though then so formidable, the Ottoman 
power has within these twenty years rapidly 
and irrecoverably declined. The great barrier 
of Turkey was reached in the first campaign 
of the next war, the Balkan yielded to Russian 
genius in the second, and Adrianople, the an- 
cient capital of the Osmanleys, became cele- 
brated for the treaty which sealed for ever the 
degradation of their race. On all sides the 
provinces of the empire have revolted: Greece, 
through a long and bloody contest, has at length 
worked out its deliverance from all but its own 
passions; the ancient war-cry of Byzantium, 
Victory to the Cross, has been again heard on 
the ^Egean Sea; j and the Pasha of Egypt, tak- 



* Travels in Turkey, by F. Blade, Esq. London, 1832. 
Blackwood's Magazine, June, 1833. 

fWhen Ihe brave Canaris passed under the bows of 
the Turkish admiral's shi|>, to which he had grappled 
the fatal fireship, at Scio, the crew in his boat exclaimed, 
" Victory to the Cross '." the old war-cry of Byzantium. 
— Gordon's Greek Revolution, i. 274. 



ing advantage of the weakness consequent on 
so many reverses, has boldly thrown off the 
yoke, and, advancing from Acre in the path of 
Napoleon, shown to the astonished world the 
justice of that great man's remark, that his 
defeat by Sir Sidney Smith under its walls 
made him miss his destiny. The victory of 
Koniah prostrated the Asiatic power of Turkey; 
the standards of Mehemet Ali rapidly ap- 
proached the Seraglio; and the discomfited 
Sultan has been driven to take refuge tinder 
the suspicious shelter of the Russian legions. 
Already the advanced guard of Nicholas has 
passed the Bosphorus ; the Moscovite standards 
are floating at Scutari; and, to the astonish- 
ment alike of Europe and Asia, the keys of the 
Dardanelles, the throne of Constantine, are laid 
at the feet of the Czar. 

The un looked for rapidity of these events, is 
not more astonishing than the weakness which 
the Mussulmans have evinced in their last strug- 
gle. The Russians, in the late campaign, never 
assembled forty thousand men in the field. In 
the battle of the 11th June, 1828, which de- 
cided the fate of the war, Diebitsch had only 
thirty-six thousand soldiers under arms ; yet this 
small force routed the Turkish army, and laid 
open the far-famed passes of the Balkan to the 
daring genius of its leader. Christendom 
looked in vain for the mighty host which, at 
the sight of the holy banner, was wont to as- 
semble round the standard of the Prophet. The 
ancient courage of the Osmanleys seemed to 
have perished with their waning fortunes; 
hardly could the Russian outposts keep pace 
with them in the rapidity of their flight; and a 
force, reduced by sickness to twenty thousand 
men, dictated peace to the Ottomans within 
twenty hours' march of Constantinople. More 
lately, the once dreaded throne of Turkey has 
become a jest to its remote provinces; the 
Pasha of Egypt, once the most inconsiderable 
of its vassals, has compelled the Sublime 
Porte, the ancient terror of Christendom, to 
seek for safety in the protection of Infidel 
battalions; and the throne of Constantine, in- 
capable of self-defence, is perhaps ultimately 
destined to become the prize for which Mos- 
covite ambition and Arabian audacity are to 
contend on the glittering shores of Scutari. 

But if the weakness of the Ottomans is sur- 
prising, the supinenessof the European pow- 
ers is not less amazing at this interesting crisis. 
The power of Russia has long been a subject 
of alarm to France, and having twice seen the 
Cossacks at the Tuileries, it is not surprising 
that they should feel somewhat nervous at 
every addition to its strength. England, jea- 
lous of its maritime superiority, and appre- 
hensive — whether reasonably or not is imma- 
terial — of danger to her Indian possessions, 
from the growth of Russian power in Asia, has 
long made it a f xed principle of her policy to 



THE FALL OF TURKEY. 



267 



coerce the ambitious designs of the Cabinet of 
St. Petersburg, and twice she has saved Turkey 
from their grasp. When the Russians and 
Austrians, in the last century, projected an 
alliance for its partition, and Catherine and 
Joseph had actually met on the Wolga to 
arrange its details, Mr. Pitt interposed, and by 
the influence of England prevented the design: 
and when Diebitsch was in full march for 
Constantinople, and the insurrection of the 
Janissaries only waited for the sight of the 
Cossacks to break out, and overturn the throne 
of Mahmoud, the strong arm of Wellington in- 
terfered, put a curb in the mouth of Russia, and 
postponed for a season the fall of the Turkish 
power. Now, however, every thing is changed ; 
— France and England, occupied with domestic 
dissensions, are utterly paralysed ; they can no 
longer make a show of resistance to Moscovite 
ambition; exclusively occupied in preparing 
the downfall of her ancient allies, the Dutch 
and the Portuguese, England has not a thought 
to bestow on the occupation of the Dardanelles, 
and the keys of the Levant are, without either 
observation or regret, passing to the hands of 
Russia. 

These events are so extraordinary, that they 
almost make the boldest speculator hold his 
breath. Great as is the change in external 
events which we daily witness, the alteration 
in internal feeling is still greater. Changes 
which would have convulsed England from 
end to end, dangers which would have thrown 
European diplomacy into agonies a few years 
ago, are now regarded with indifference. The 
progress of Russia through Asia, the capture 
of Erivan and Erzeroum, the occupation of the 
Dardanelles, are now as little regarded as if 
we had no interest in such changes ; as if we 
had no empire in the East threatened by so 
ambitious a neighbour; no independence at 
stake in the growth of the Colossus of northern 
Europe. 

The reason is apparent, and it affords the 
first great and practical proof which England 
has yet received of the fatal blow, which the 
recent changes have struck, not only at her 
internal prosperity, but her external independ- 
ence. England is now powerless; and, what 
is worse, the European powers know it. Her 
government is so incessantly and exclusively 
occupied in maintaining its ground against the 
internal enemies whom the Reform Bill has 
raised up into appalling strength; the neces- 
sity of sacrificing something to the insatiable 
passions of the revolutionists is so apparent, 
that every other object is disregarded. The 
allies by whose aid they overthrew the con- 
stitution, have turned so fiercely upon them, 
that they are forced to strain every nerve to 
resist these domestic enemies. Who can think 
of the occupation of Scutari, when the malt tax 
is threatened with repeal? Who care for the 
thunders of Nicholas, when the threats of 
O'Connell are ringing in their ears? The 
English government, once so stable and stead- 
fast in its resolutions, when rested on the firm 
rock of the Aristocracy, has become unstable 
as water since it was thrown for its support 
upon the Democracy. Its designs are as 
changeable, its policy as fluctuating, as the 



volatile and inconsiderate mass from which it 
sprung; and hence its menaces are disre- 
garded, its ancient relations broken, its old 
allies disgusted, and the weight of its influence 
being no longer felt, projects the most threat- 
ening to its independence are without hesita- 
tion undertaken by other states. 

Nor is the supineness and apathy of the 
nation less important or alarming. It exists 
to such an extent as clearly to demonstrate, 
that not only are the days of its glory num- 
bered, but the termination even of its inde- 
pendence may be foreseen at no distant period. 
Enterprises the most hostile to its interests, 
conquests the most fatal to its glory, are un- 
dertaken by its rivals not only without the 
disapprobation, but with the cordial support, 
of the majority of the nation. Portugal, for a 
century the ally of England, for whose defence 
hundreds of thousands of Englishmen had died 
in our own times, has been abandoned without 
a murmur to the revolutionary spoliation and 
propagandist arts of France. Holland, the 
bulwark of England, for whose protection the 
great war with France was undertaken, has 
been assailed by British fleets, and threatened 
by British power ; and the shores of the 
Scheldt, which beheld the victorious legions of 
Wellington land to curb the power of Napo- 
leon, have witnessed the union of the tricolour 
and British flags, to beat down the indepen- 
dence of the Dutch provinces. Constantino- 
ple, long regarded as the outpost of India 
against the Russians, is abandoned without 
regret; and, amidst the strife of internal fac- 
tion, the fixing of the Moscovite standards on 
the shores of the Bosphorus, the transference 
of the finest harbour in the world to a growing 
maritime power, and of the entrepot of Europe 
and Asia to an already formidable commercial 
state, is hardly the subject of observation. 

The reason cannot be concealed, and is too 
clearly illustrative of the desperate tendency 
of the recent changes upon all the classes of 
the empire. With the revolutionists the pas- 
sion for change has supplanted every other 
feeling, and the spirit of innovation has extin- 
guished that of patriotism. They no longer 
league in thought, or word, or wish, exclusive- 
ly with their own countrymen ; they no longer 
regard the interests and glory of England, as 
the chief objects of their solicitude ; what they 
look to is the revolutionary party in other 
states ; what they sympathize with, the pro- 
gress of the tricolour in overturning other dy- 
nasties. The loss of British dominion, the 
loss of British colonies, the downfall of British 
power, the decay of British glory, the loss of 
British independence, is to them a matter of 
no regret, provided the tricolour is triumphant, 
and the cause of revolution is making progress 
in the world. Well and truly did Mr. Burke 
say, that the spirit of patriotism and Jacobin 
ism could not coexist in the same state ; and 
that the greatest national disasters are lightly 
passed over, provided they bring with them 
the advance of domestic ambition. 

The Conservatives, on the other hand, are 
so utterly desperate in regard to the future 
prospects of the empire, from the vacillation 
and violence of the Democratic party who are 



268 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



installed in sovereignty, that external events, 
even of the most threatening character, are 
regarded by them but as dust in the balance, 
when compared with the domestic calamities 
which are staring us in the face. What al- 
though the ingratitude and tergiversation of 
England to Holland have deprived ns of all 
respect among foreign states ? That evil, 
great as it is, is nothing to the domestic em- 
barrassments which overwhelm the country 
from the unruly spirit which the Whigs fos- 
tered with such sedulous care during the Re- 
form contest. What although the empire of 
the Mediterranean, and ultimately our Indian 
possessions, are menaced by the ceaseless 
growth of Russia; the measures which go- 
vernment have in contemplation for the ma- 
nagement of that vast dominion, will sever it 
from the British empire before any danger is 
felt from external foes ; and long ere the Mos- 
covite eagles are seen on the banks of the In- 
dus, the insane measures of the Ten Pounders 
will in all probability have banished the Bri- 
tish standards from the plains of Hindostan. 

Every thing, in short, announces that the 
external weight and foreign importance of 
Great Britain are irrecoverably lost; and that 
the passing of the Reform Bill will ultimately 
prove to have been the death-warrant of the 
British empire. The Russians are at Con- 
stantinople ! the menaces, the entreaties of 
England, are alike disregarded; and the ruler 
of the seas has submitted in two years to de- 
scend to the rank of a second-rate power. 
That which a hundred defeats could have 
hardly effected to old England, is the very first 
result of the innovating system upon which 
new England has entered. The Russians are 
at Constantinople ! How would the shade of 
Chatham, or Pitt, or Fox thrill at the an- 
nouncement ! But it makes no sort of im- 
pression on the English people: as little as 
the robbery of the Portuguese fleet by the 
French, or the surrender of the citadel of Ant- 
werp to the son-in-law of Louis Philippe. In 
this country we have arrived, in an incon- 
ceivably short space of time, at that weakness, 
disunion, and indifference to all but revolu- 
tionary objects, which is at once the forerun- 
ner and the cause of national ruin. 

But leaving these mournful topics, it is more 
instructive to turn to the causes which have 
precipitated, in so short a space of time, the 
fall of the Turkish empire. Few more curious 
or extraordinary phenomena are to be met 
with in the page of history. It will be found 
that the Ottomans have fallen a victim to the 
same passion for innovation and reform which 
have proved so ruinous both in this and a 
neighbouring country; and that, while the 
bulwarks of Turkey were thrown down by 
the rude hand of Mahmoud, the States of West- 
ern Europe were disabled, by the same frantic 
course, from rendering him any effectual aid. 
How well in every age has the spirit of Jaco- 
binism and revolutionary passion aided the 
march, and hastened the growth of Russia! 

The fact of the long duration of Turkey, in 
the midst of the monarchies of Europe, and 
the stubborn resistance which she opposed for 
a series of ages to the attacks of the two great- 



est of its military powers, is of itself sufficient 
to demonstrate that the accounts on which we 
had been accustomed to rely of the condition 
of the Ottoman empire were partial or exag- 
gerated. No fact is so universally demonstrated 
by history as the rapid and irrecoverable de- 
cline of barbarous powers, when the career 
of conquest is once terminated. Where is 
now the empire of the Caliphs or the Moors! 
What has survived of the conquests, one hun- 
dred years ago, of Nadir Shah? How long 
did the empire of Aurengzebe, the throne of 
the Great Mogul, resist the attacks of England, 
even at the distance of ten thousand miles 
from the parent state 1 How then did it hap- 
pen that Turkey so long resisted the spoiler! 
What conservative principle has enabled the 
Osmanleys so long to avoid the degradation 
which so rapidly overtakes all barbarous and 
despotic empires; and what has communi- 
cated to their vast empire a portion of the 
undecaying vigour which has hitherto been 
considered as the grand characteristic of Eu- 
ropean civilization ? The answer to these 
questions will both unfold the real causes of 
the long endurance, and at length the sudden 
fall, of the Turkish empire. 

Though the Osmanleys were an Asiatic 
power, and ruled entirely on the principles of 
Asiatic despotism, yet their conquests were 
effected in Europe, or in those parts of Asia 
in which, from the influence of the Crusades, 
or of the Roman institutions which survived 
their invasion, a certain degree of European 
civilization remained. It is difficult utterly to 
exterminate the institutions of a country where 
they have been long established; those of the 
Christian provinces of the Roman empire have 
in part survived all the dreadful tempests 
which for the last six centuries have passed 
over their surface. It is these remnants of 
civilization, it is the institutions which still 
linger among the vanquished people, which 
have so long preserved the Turkish provinces 
from decay; and it is these ancient bulwarks, 
which the innovating passions of Mahmoud 
have now destroyed. 

1. The first circumstance which upheld, 
amidst its numerous defects, the Ottoman em- 
pire, was the rights conceded on the first con- 
quest of the country by Mahomet to the dere 
beys or ancient nobles of Asia Minor, and 
which the succeeding sultans have been care- 
ful to maintain inviolate. These dere beys all 
capitulated with the conqueror, and obtained 
the important privileges of retaining their 
lands in perpetuity for their descendants, and 
of paying a fixed tribute in money and men to 
the sultan. In other words, they were a here- 
ditary noblesse ; and as they constituted the 
great strength of the empire in its Asiatic pro- 
vinces, they have preserved their privilege 
through all succeeding reigns. The following 
is the description given of them by the intelli- 
gent traveller whose work is prefixed to this 
article : — 

"The dere beys," says Mr. Slade, "literally 
lords of the valleys, an expression peculiarly 
adapted to the country, which presents a series 
of oval valleys, surrounded by ramparts of 
hills, were the original possessors of those parts 



THE FALL OF TURKEY. 



269 



of Asia Minor, which submitted, under feudal 
conditions, to the Ottomans. Between the 
conquest of Brussa and the conquest of Con- 
stantinople, a lapse of more than a century, 
chequered by the episode of Tamerlane, their 
faith was precarious ; but after the latter event, 
Mahomet II. bound their submission, and 
finally settled the terms of their existence. He 
confirmed them in their lands, subject, how- 
ever, to tribute, and to quotas of troops in war; 
and he absolved the head of each family for 
ever from personal service. The last clause 
was the most important, as thereby the sultan 
had no power over their lives, nor consequent- 
ly, could be their heirs, that despotic power 
bein"- lawful over those only in the actual ser- 
viced the Porte. The families of the dere 
beys, therefore, became neither impoverished 
nor extinct. It would be dealing in truisms to 
enumerate the advantages enjoyed by the dis- 
tricts of these noblemen over the rest of the 
empire; they were oases in the desert: their 
owners had more than a life-interest in the 
soil, they were born and lived among the peo- 
ple, and, being hereditarily rich, had no occa- 
sion to create a private fortune, each year, 
after the tribute due was levied. Whereas, in 
a pashalic the people are strained every year 
to double or treble the amount of the impost, 
since the pasha, who pays for his situation, 
must also be enriched. The devotion of the 
dependents of the dere beys was great: at a 
whistle, the Car'osman-Oglous, the Tchapan- 
Oglous, the Ellezar-Oglous, (the principal 
Asiatic families that survive,) could raise, 
each, from ten thousand to twenty thousand 
horsemen, and equip them. Hence the facility 
with which the sultans, up to the present cen- 
tury, drew such large bodies of cavalry into 
the 'field. The dere beys have always fur- 
nished, and maintained, the greatest part; and 
there is not one instance, since the conquest 
of Constantinople, of one of these great fami- 
lies raising the standard of revolt. The pashas 
invariably have. The reasons, respectively, 
are obvious. The dere bey was sure of keep- 
ing his possessions by right: the pasha of 
losing his by custom, unless he had money to 
bribe the Porte, or force to intimidate it. 

'• These provincial nobles, whose rights had 
been respected during four centuries, by a 
series of twenty-four sovereigns, had two 
crimes in the eyes of Mahmoud II. ; they held 
their property from their ancestors, and they 
bad riches. To alter the tenure of the former, 
the destination of the latter, was his object. 
The dere beys — unlike the seraglio dependents, 
brought up to distrust their own shadows — had 
no causes for suspicion, and therefore became 
easy dupes of the grossest treachery. The 
unbending spirits were removed to another 
world, the flexible were despoiled of their 
wealth. Some few await their turn, or, their 
eyes opened, prepare to resist oppression. 
Car'osman Oglou, for example, was summon- 
ed to Constantinople, where expensive em- 
ployments, forced on him during several years, 
reduced his ready cash ; while a follower of 
the seraglio resided at his city of Magnesia, to 
collect his revenues. His peasants, in conse- 
quence, ceased to cultivate their lands, from 



whence they no longer hoped to reap profit; 
and his once flourishing possessions soon be- 
came as desolate as any which had always 
been under the gripe of pashas." 

This passage throws the strongest light on 
the former condition of the Turkish empire 
They possessed an hereditary noblesse in their 
Asiatic provinces ; a body of men whose in- 
terests were permanent; who enjoyed their 
rights by succession, and, therefore, were per- 
manently interested in preserving their pos- 
sessions from spoliation. It was their feudal 
tenantry who flocked in such multitudes to the 
standard of Mohammed when any great crisis 
occurred, and formed those vast armies who 
so often astonished the European powers, and 
struck terror into the boldest hearts in Christ- 
endom. These hereditary nobles, however, 
the bones of the empire, whose estates were 
exempt from the tyranny of the pashas, have 
been destroyed by Mahmoud. Hence the dis- 
affection of the Asiatic provinces, and the rea- 
diness with which they opened their arms to 
the liberating standards of Mehemet Ali. It is 
the nature of innovation, whether enforced by 
the despotism of a sultan or a democracy, to 
destroy in its fervour the institutions on which 
public freedom is founded. 

2. The next circumstance which contributed 
to mitigate the severity of Ottoman oppression 
was the privileges of the provincial cities, 
chiefly in Europe, which consisted in being 
governed by magistrates elected by the people 
themselves from among their chief citizens. 
This privilege, a relic of the rights of the 
Municipal over the whole Roman empire, was 
established in all the great towns; and its im- 
portance in moderating the otherwise intoler- 
able weight of Ottoman oppression was incal- 
culable. The pashas, or temporary rulers 
appointed by the sultan, had no authority, or 
only a partial one in these free cities, and 
hence they formed nearly as complete an 
asylum for industry in Europe as the estates 
of the dere beys did in Asia. This important 
right, however, could not escape the reforming 
passion of Mahmoud; and it was accordingly 
overturned. 

"In conjunction with subverting the dere 
beys, Mahmoud attacked the privileges of the 
great provincial cities, (principally in Europe,) 
which consisted in the election of ayans (ma- 
gistrates) by the people, from among the nota- 
bles. Some cities were solely governed by 
them, and in those ruled by pashas, they had, 
in most cases, sufficient influence to restrain 
somewhat the full career of despotism. They 
were the protectors of rayas, as well as of 
Mussulmans, and, for their own sakes, resist- 
ed exorbitant imposts. The change in the 
cities where their authority has been abolished 
(Adrianople, e. g.) is deplorable; trade has 
since languished, and population has diminish- 
ed. They were instituted by Solyman, (the 
lawgiver,) and the protection which they have 
invariably afforded the Christian subjects of 
the Porte, entitles them to a Christian's good 
word. Their crime, that of the dere beys, was 
being possessed of authority not emanating 
from the sultan. 

"Had Mahmoud II. intrusted the govern 
z2 



270 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



ment of the provinces to the dere beys, and 
strengthened the authority of the ayans, he 
would have truly reformed his empire, by 
restoring it to its brightest state, have gained 
the love of his subjects, and the applauses of 
humanity. By the contrary proceeding, sub- 
verting two bulwarks (though dilapidated) of 
national prosperity — a provincial nobility and 
magistracy — he has shown himself a selfish 
tyrant." 

3. In addition to an hereditary nobility in 
the dere beys, and the privileges of corpora- 
tions in the right of electing their ayans, the 
Mussulmans possessed a powerful hierarchy 
in the ulerna; a most important body in the 
Ottoman dominions, and whose privileges 
have gone far to limit the extent of its des- 
potic government. This important institution 
has been little understood hitherto in Europe ; 
but they have contributed in a most important 
manner to mitigate the severity of the sultan 
in those classes who enjoyed no special pro- 
tection. 

" In each of the Turkish cities," says Mr. 
Slade, " reside a muphti and a rnollah. A 
knowledge of Arabic, so as to be able to read 
the Koran in the original, is considered suffi- 
cient for the former, but the latter must have 
run a legal career in one of the medressehs, 
(universities of Constantinople.) After thirty 
years' probation in a medresseh, the student 
becomes of the class of muderis, (doctors at 
law,) from which are chosen the mollahs, 
comprehended under the name of ulema. 
Students who accept the inferior judicial ap- 
pointments can never become of the ulema. 

"The ulema is divided into three classes, 
according to a scale of the cities of the empire. 
The first class consists of the cazi-askers, 
(chief judges of Europe and Asia;) the Stam- 
boul effendisi, (mayor of Constantinople;) the 
mollahs qualified to act at Mecca, at Medina, 
at Jerusalem, at Bagdat, at Salon ica, at Alep- 
po, at Damascus, at Brussa, at Cairo, at Smyr- 
na, at Cogni, at Galata, at Scutari. The se- 
cond class consists of the mollahs qualified to 
act at the twelve cities of next importance. 
The third class at ten inferior cities. The 
administration of minor towns is intrusted to 
cadis, who are nominated by ihe cazi-askers in 
their respective jurisdictions, a patronage 
which produces great wealth to these two 
officers. 

"In consequence of these powers the mollah 
of a city may prove as great a pest as a needy r 
pasha; but as the mollahs are hereditarily 
wealthy, they are generally moderate in their 
perquisitions, and often protect the people 
against the extortions of the pasha. The 
cadis, however, of the minor towns, who have 
not the advantage of being privately rich, sel- 
dom fail to join with the aga to skin the ' ser- 
pent that crawls in the dust.' 

"The mollahs, dating from the reign of So- 
lyman — zenith of Ottoman prosperity — were 
not slow in discovering the value of their 
situations, or in taking advantage of them ; 
and as their sanctity protected them from spo- 
liation, they were enabled to leave their riches 
to their children, who were brought up to the 
same career, and were, by privilege, allowed 



to finish their studies at the medresseh in eight 
years less time than the prescribed number of 
years, the private tuition which they were sup- 
posed to receive from their fathers making up 
for the deficiency. Thus, besides the influence 
of birth and wealth, they had a direct facility 
in attaining the degree of muderi, which their 
fellow-citizens and rivals had not, and who 
were obliged in consequence to accept inferior 
judicial appointments. In process of time the 
whole monopoly of the ulema centred in a 
certain number of families, and their constant 
residence at the capital, to which they return 
at the expiration of their term of office, has 
maintained their power to the present day r . 
Nevertheless, it is true that if a student of a 
medresseh, not of the privileged order, pos- 
sess extraordinary merit, the ulema has gene- 
rally the tact to admit him of the body: wo to 
the cities to which he goes as mollah, since 
he has to create a private fortune for his family. 
Thus arose that body — the peerage of Turkey — 
known by the name of ulema, a body uniting 
the high attributes of law and religion ; dis- 
tinct from the clergy, yet enjoying all the ad- 
vantages connected with a church paramount ; 
free from its shackles, yet retaining the perfect 
odour of sanctity. Its combination has given 
it a greater hold in the state than the dere beys, 
though possessed individually of more power, 
founded too on original charters, sunk from a 
want of union." 

The great effect of the ulema has arisen 
from this, that its lands are safe from confis- 
cation or arbitrary taxation. To power of 
every sort, excepting that of a triumphant de- 
mocracy, there must be some limits; and great 
as the authority of the sultan is, he is too de- 
pendent on the religious feelings of his subjects 
to be able to overturn the church. The conse- 
quence is that the vacouf or church lands have 
been always free both from arbitrary taxation 
and confiscation; and hence they have funned 
a species of mortmain or entailed lands in the 
Ottoman dominions, enjoying privileges to 
which the other parts of the empire, excepting 
the estates of the dere beys, are entire strangers. 
Great part of the lands of Turkey, in many 
places amounting to one-third of the whole, 
were held by this religious tenure; and the 
device was frequently adopted of leaving pro- 
perty to the ulema in trust for particular fami- 
lies, whereby the benefits of secure hereditary 
descent were obtained. The practical advan- 
tages of this ecclesiastical property are thus 
enumerated by Mr. Slade. 

"The vacouf (mosque lands) have been 
among the best cultivated in Turkey, by being 
free from arbitrary taxation. The mektebs (pub- 
lic schools) in all the great cities, where the ru- 
diments of the Turkish language and the Koran 
are taught, and where poor scholars receive 
food gratis, are supported by the ulema. The 
medressehs, imarets, (hospitals,) fountains, 
<fec, are all maintained by the ulema; add to 
these the magnificence of the mosques, their 
number, the royal sepultures, and it will be 
seen that Turkey owes much to the existence 
of this body, which has been enabled, by its 
power and its union, to resist royal cupidity. 
Without it, where would be the establishments 



THE FALL OF TURKEY. 



271 



above mentioned 1 Religious property has 
been an object of attack in every country. At 
one period, by the sovereign, to increase his 
power; at another, by the people, to build for- 
tunes on its downfall. Mahomet IV., after the 
disastrous retreat of his grand vizir, Cara Mus- 
tapha, from before Vienna, 1683, seized on the 
riches of the principal mosques, which arbi- 
trary act led to his deposition. The ulema 
would have shown a noble patriotism in giv- 
ing its wealth for the service of the state, but 
it was right in resenting the extortion, which 
would have served as a precedent for succeed- 
ing sultans. In fine, rapid as has been the 
decline of the Ottoman empire since victory 
ceased to attend its arms, I venture to assert, 
that it would have been tenfold more rapid but 
for the privileged orders — the dere beys and the 
ulema. Without their powerful weight and 
influence — effect of hereditary wealth and 
sanctity — the Janissaries would long since have 
cut Turkey in slices, and have ruled it as the 
Mamelukes ruled Egypt. 

"Suppose, now, the influence of the ulema 
to be overturned, what would be the conse- 
quence? The mollaships, like the pashalics, 
would then be sold to the highest bidders, or 
given to the needy followers of the seraglio. 
These must borrow money of the bankers for 
their outfit, which must be repaid, and their 
own purses lined, by their talents at extor- 
tion." 

It is one of the most singular proofs of the 
tendency of innovation to blind its votaries to 
the effects of the measures it advocates, that 
the ulema has long been singled out for de- 
struction by the reforming sultan, and the 
change is warmly supported by many of the 
inconsiderate Franks who dwell in the east. 
Such is the aversion of men of every faith to 
the vesting of property or influence in the 
church, that they would willingly see this one 
of the last barriers which exist against arbi- 
trary power done away. The power of the 
sultan, great as it is, has not yet ventured on 
this great innovation; but it is well known 
that he meditates it, and it is the knowledge 
of this circumstance which is one great cause 
of the extreme unpopularity which has ren- 
dered his government unable to obtain an}' 
considerable resources from his immense do- 
minions. 

4. In every part of the empire, the superior 
felicity and well-being of the peasantry in the 
mountains is conspicuous, and has long at- 
tracted the attention of travellers. Clarke 
observed it in the mountains of Greece, Ma- 
riti, and others in Syria and Asia Minor, and 
Mr. Slade and Mr. Walch in the Balkan, and 
the hilly country of Bulgaria. " No peasantry 
in the world," says the former, "are so well 
off as that of Bulgaria. The lowest of them 
has abundance of every thing — meat, poultry, 
eggs, milk, rice, cheese, wine, bread, good 
clothing, a warm dwelling, and a horse to ride. 
It is true he has no newspaper to kindle his 
passions, nor a knife and fork to eat with, nor 
a bedstead to lie on ; but these are the customs 
of the country, and a pasha is equally unhappy. 
Where, then, is the tyranny under which the 
Christian subjects of the Porte are generally 



supposed to groan 1 Not among the Bulga- 
rians certainly. I wish that in every country 
a traveller could pass from one end to the 
other, and find a good supper and a warm fire 
in every cottage, as he can in this part of 
European Turkey."* This description applies 
generally to almost all the mountainous pro- 
vinces of the Ottoman empire, and in an espe- 
cial manner to the peasants of Parnassus and 
Olympia, as described by Clarke. As a con- 
trast to this delightful state of society, we may 
quote the same traveller's account of the plains 
of Romelia. " Romelia, if cultivated, would 
become the granary of the East, whereas Con- 
stantinople depends on Odessa for daily bread. 
The burial-grounds, choked with weeds and 
underwood, constantly occurring in every tra- 
veller's route, far remote from habitations, are 
eloquent testimonials of continued depopula- 
tion. The living too are far apart; a town 
every fifty miles, and a village every ten miles, 
is close, and horsemen meeting on the high- 
way regard each other as objects of curiosity. 
The cause of this depopulation is to be found 
in the pernicious government of the Otto- 
mans."-)- The cause of this remarkable dif- 
ference lies in the fact, that the Ottoman op- 
pression has never yet fully extended into the 
mountainous parts of its dominions ; and, 
consequently, they remained like permanent 
veins of prosperity, intersecting the country 
in every direction, amidst the desolation which 
generally prevailed in the pashalics of the 
plain. 

5. The Janissaries were another institution 
which upheld the Turkish empire. They 
formed a regular standing army, who, although 
at times extremely formidable to the sultan, 
and exercising their influence with all the 
haughtiness of Praetorian guards, were yet of 
essential service in repelling the invasion of 
the Christian powers. The strength of the 
Ottoman armies consisted in the Janissaries, 
and the Delhis and Spahis ; the former be- 
ing the regular force, the latter the contingents 
of the dere beys. Every battle-field, from 
Constantinople to Vienna, can tell of the va- 
lour of the Janissaries, long and justly re- 
garded as the bulwark of the empire; and the 
Russian battalions, with all their firmness, 
were frequently broken, even in the last war. 
by the desperate charge of the Delhis. Now, 
however, both are destroyed; the vigorous 
severity of the sultan has annihilated the 
dreaded battalions of the former — the ruin of 
the dere beys has closed the supply of the 
latter. In these violent and impolitic reforms 
is to be found the immediate cause of the de- 
struction of the Turkish empire. 

Of the revolt which led to the destruction of 
this great body, and the policy which led to it, 
the following striking account is given by Mr. 
Slade : 

" Every campaign during the Greek war a 
body was embarked on board the fleet, and 
landed in small parties, purposely unsupported, 
on the theatre of war: none returned, so that 
only a few thousand remained at Constanti- 
nople, when, May 30, 1826, the Sultan issued a 



* Slade. ii 97 



t Ibid. 15. 



272 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



hatti scheriff concerning the formation of ' a 
new victorious army.' This was a flash of 
'ightning in the eyes of the Janissaries. They 
saw why their companions did not return from 
Greece; they saw that the old, hitherto abor- 
tive, policy, dormant since eighteen years, was 
revived ; they saw that their existence was 
threatened; and they resolved to resist, con- 
fiding in the prestige of their name. June 15, 
following, they reversed their soup-kettles, 
(signal of revolt,) demanded the heads of the 
ministers, and the revocation of the said fir- 
man. But Mahmoud was prepared for them. 
Husseyin, the aga of the Janissaries, was in 
his interests, and with him the yamaks, (gar- 
risons of the castles of the Bosphoxus,) the 
Galiondgis, and the Topchis. Collecting, there- 
fore, on the following morning, his forces in 
the Atmeidan, the sand-jack scherifF was dis- 
played, and the ulema seconded him by calling 
on the people to support their sovereign against 
the rebels. Still, noways daunted, the Janis- 
saries advanced, and summoned their aga, of 
whom they had no suspicion, to repeat their 
demands to the sultan, threatening, in case of 
non-compliance, to force the seraglio gates. 
Husseyin, who had acted his part admirably, 
and with consummate duplicity, brought them 
to the desired point — open rebellion — flattering 
them with success, now threw aside the mask. 
He stigmatized them as infidels, and called on 
them, in the name of the prophet, to submit to 
the sultan's clemency. At this defection of 
their trusted favourite chief, their smothered 
rage burst out; they rushed to his house, razed 
it in a moment, did the same by the houses of 
the other ministers, applied torches, and in 
half an hour Constantinople streamed with 
blood beneath the glare of flames. Mahmoud 
hesitated, and was about to conciliate ; but 
Husseyin repulsed the idea with firmness, 
knowing that to effect conciliation, his head 
must be the first offering. ' Now or never,' he 
replied to the sultan, 'is the time ! Think not 
that a few heads will appease this sedition, 
which has been too carefully fomented by me, 
— the wrongs of the Janissaries too closely 
dwelt on, thy character too blackly stained, thy 
treachery too minutely dissecled, — to be easily 
laid. Remember that this is the second time 
that thy arm has been raised against them, and 
they will not trust thee again. Remember, too, 
that thou hast now a son, that son not in thy 
power, whom they will elevate on thy down- 
fall. Now is the time! This evening's sun 
must set for the last time on them or us. Re- 
tire from the city, that thy sacred person may 
be safe, and leave the rest to me.' Mahmoud 
consented, and went to Dolma Bachtche, (a 
palace one mile up the Bosphorus,) to await 
the result. Husseyin, then free to act without 
fear of interruption, headed his yamaks, and 
vigorously attacked the rebels, who, cowardly 
as they were insolent, offered a feeble resist- 
ance, when they found themselves unsupported 
by the mob, retreated from street to street, and 
finally took refuge in the Atmeidan. Here 
their career ended. A masked battery on the 
hill beyond opened on them, troops enclosed 
them in, and fire was applied to the wooden 
buildings. Desperation then gave them the 



courage that might have saved them at first, 
and they strove with madness to force a pas- 
sage from the burning pile; part were con- 
sumed, part cut down; a few only got out, 
among them five colonels, who threw them- 
selves at the aga's feet, and implored grace. 
They spoke their last." 

Five thousand fell under this grand blow in 
the capital alone ; twenty-five thousand perish- 
ed throughout the whole empire. The next 
day a hatti scheriff was read in the mosques, 
declaring the Janissaries infamous, the order 
abolished, and the name an anathema. 

This great stroke made a prodigious sensa- 
tion in Europe, and even the best informed 
were deceived as to its effects on the future 
prospects of the Ottoman empire. By many 
it was compared to the destruction of the 
Strelitzes by Peter the Great, and the resurrec- 
tion of Turkey anticipated from the great 
reform of Mahmoud, as Moscovy arose from 
the vigorous measures of the czar. But the 
cases and the men were totally different. Peter, 
though a despot, was practically acquainted 
with his country. He had voluntarily descend- 
ed to the humblest rank, to make himself mas- 
ter of the arts of life. When he had destroyed 
the Praetorian guards of Moscow, he built up 
the new military force of the empire, in strict 
accordance with its national and religious 
feelings, and the victory of Pultowa was the 
consequence. But what did Sultan Mah- 
moud ? Having destroyed the old military 
force of Turkey, he subjected the new levies 
which were to replace it to such absurd regula- 
tions, and so thoroughly violated the political 
and religious feelings of the country, that none 
of the Osmanleys who could possibly avoid it 
would enter his ranks, and he was obliged to 
fill them up with mere boys, who had not yet 
acquired any determinate feelings — a wretched 
substitute for the old military force of the em- 
pire, and which proved totally unequal to the 
task of facing the veteran troops of Russia. 
The impolicy of his conduct in destroying and 
re-building, is more clearly evinced by nothing 
than the contrast it affords to the conduct of 
Sultan Amurath, in originally forming these 
guards. 

" Strikingly," says Mr. Slade, " does the con- 
duct of Mahmoud, in forming the new levies, 
contrast with that of Amurath in the formation 
of the Janissaries; the measures being parallel, 
inasmuch as each was a mighty innovation, 
no less than the establishment of an entire new 
military force, on the institutions of the coun- 
try. But Amurath had a master mind. Instead 
of keeping his new army distinct from the na- 
tion, he incorporated it with it, made it conform 
in all respects to national usages; and the suc- 
cess was soon apparent by its spreading into 
a vast national guard, of which, in later times, 
some thousands usurped the permanence of 
enrolment, in which the remainder, through 
indolence, acquiesced. Having destroyed these 
self-constituted battalions, Mahmoud should 
have made the others available, instead of out- 
lawing them, as it were ; and, by respecting 
their traditionary whims and social rights, he 
would easily have given his subjects a taste 
for European discipline. They never objected 



THE FALL OF TURKEY. 



273 



to it in principle, but their untutored minds 
could not understand why, in order to use the 
musket and bayonet, and manoeuvre together, 
it was necessary to leave off wearing beards 
and turbans. 

" But Mahmoud, in his hatred, wished to 
condemn them to oblivion, to eradicate every 
token of their pre-existence, not knowing that 
trampling on a grovelling party is the surest 
way of giving it fresh spirit ; and trampling 
on the principles of the party in question, was 
trampling on the principles of the whole na- 
tion. In fiis ideas, the Oriental usages in 
eating, dressing, &c, were connected with the 
Janissaries, had been invented by them, and 
therefore he proscribed them, prescribing new 
modes. He changed the costume of his court 
from Asiatic to European; he ordered his 
soldiers to shave their beards, recommending 
his courtiers to follow the same example, and 
he forbade the turban, — that valued, darling, 
beautiful head-dress, at once national and reli- 
gious. His folly therein cannot be sufficiently 
reprobated: had he reflected that Janissarism 
was only a branch grafted on a wide-spreading 
tree, that it sprung from the Turkish nation, 
not the Turkish nation from it, he would have 
seen how impossible was the more than Her- 
culean task he assumed, of suddenly transform- 
ing national manners consecrated by centuries, 
— a task from which his prophet would have 
shrunk. The disgust excited by these sump- 
tuary laws may be conceived. Good Mussul- 
mans declared them unholy and scandalous, 
and the Asiatics, to a man, refused obedience ; 
but as Mahmoud's horizon was confined to his 
court, he did not know but what his edicts 
were received with veneration. 

" If Mahmoud had stopped at these follies in 
the exercise of his newly-acquired despotic 
power, it would have been well. His next 
step was to increase the duty on all provisions 
in Constantinople, and in the great provincial 
cities, to the great discontent of the lower 
classes, which was expressed by firing the 
city to such an extent that in the first three 
months six thousand houses were consumed. 
The end of October, 1826, was also marked by 
a general opposition to the new imposts; but 
repeated executions at length brought the 
people to their senses, and made them regret 
the loss of the Janissaries, who had been their 
protectors as well as tormentors, inasmuch as 
they had never allowed the price of provisions 
to be raised. These disturbances exasperated 
the sultan. He did not attribute them to the 
right cause, distress, but to a perverse spirit 
of Janissarism, a suspicion of harbouring 
which was death to any one. He farther ex- 
tended his financial operations by raising the 
miri (land tax) all over the empire, and, in 
ensuing years, by granting monopolies on all 
articles of commerce to the highest bidder. 
In consequence, lands, which had produced 
abundance, in 1830 lay waste. Articles of 
export, as opium, silk, &c, gave the growers a 
handsome revenue when they could sell them 
to the Frank merchants, but at the low prices 
fixed by the monopolists they lose, and the 
cultivation languishes. Sultan Mahmoud kills 
the goose for the eggs. In a word, he adopted 
35 



in full the policy of Mehemet Ali, which sup- 
posed the essence of civilization and of politi- 
cal science to be contained in the word taxa- 
tion : and having driven his chariot over the 
necks of the dere beys, and of the Janissaries, 
he resolved to tie his subjects to its wheels, 
and to keep them in dire slavery. Hence a 
mute struggle began throughout the empire 
between the sultan and the Turks, the former 
trying to reduce the latter to the condition of 
the Egyptian fellahs, the latter unwilling to 
imitate the fellahs in patient submission. The 
sultan flatters himself (1830) that he is suc- 
ceeding, because the taxes he imposed, and 
the monopolies he has granted, produce him 
more revenue than he had formerly. The 
people, although hitherto they have been able 
to answer the additional demands by opening 
their hoards, evince a sullen determination not 
to continue doing so, by seceding gradually 
from their occupations, and barely existing. 
The result must be, if the sultan cannot com- 
pel them to work, as the Egyptians, under the 
lashes of task-masters, either a complete stag- 
nation of agriculture and trade, ever at a low 
ebb in Turkey, or a general rebellion, produced 
by misery." 

The result of these precipitate and monstrous 
innovations strikingly appeared in the next war 
with Russia. The Janissaries and dere beys- 
were destroyed — the Mussulmans everywhere 
disgusted; the turban, the national dress — the 
scimitar, the national weapon, were laid aside 
in the army; and instead of the fierce and va- 
liant Janissaries wielding that dreaded wea- 
pon, there was to be found only in the army 
boys of sixteen, wearing caps in the European 
style, and looked upon as little better than he- 
retics by all true believers. 

" Instead of the Janissaries," says Mr. Slade, 
"the sultan reviewed for our amusement, on 
the plains of Ramis Tchiftlik, his regular 
troops, which were quartered in and about 
Constantinople, amounting to about four thou- 
sand five hundred foot, and six hundred horse ; 
though beyond being dressed and armed uni- 
formly, scarcely meriting the name of soldiers. 
What a sight for Count Orloff, then ambassa- 
dor-extraordinary, filling the streets of Pera 
with his Cossacks and Circassians ! The 
Count, whom the sultan often amused with a 
similar exhibition of his weakness, used to 
say, in reference to the movements of these 
successors of the Janissaries, that the cavalry 
were employed in holding on, the infantry knew a 
Utile, and the artillery galloped about as though be- 
longing to no party. Yet over such troops do 
the Russians boast of having gained victories ! 
In no one thing did Sultan Mahmoud make a 
greater mistake, than in changing the mode of 
mounting the Turkish cavalry, which before 
had perfect seats, with perfect command over 
their horses, and only required a little order to 
transform the best irregular horse in the world 
into the best regular horse. But Mahmoud, in 
all his changes, took the mask for the man, !he 
rind for the fruit. European cavalry rode flat 
saddles with long stirrups ; therefore he thought 
it necessary that his cavalry should do the same. 
European infantry wore tight jackets and close 
caps; therefore the same. Were this blind 



274 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



adoption of forms only useless, or productive 
only of physical inconvenience, patience ; but 
it proved a moral evil, creating unbounded dis- 
gust. The privation of the turban particularly 
affected the soldiers; first, on account of the 
feeling of insecurity about the head with a fez 
on ; secondly, as being opposed to the love of 
dress, which a military life, more than any 
other, engenders." 

"Mahmoud," says the same author, "will 
learn that in having attacked the customs of 
his nation — customs descended to it from 
Abraham, and respected by Mohammed— he 
has directly undermined the divine right of his 
family, that right being only so considered by 
custom — by its harmonizing with all other che- 
rished usages. He will learn, that in having 
wantonly trampled on the unwritten laws of 
the land, those traditionary rights which were 
as universal household gods, he has put arms 
in the hands of the disaffected, which no rebel 
has hitherto had. Neither Ali Pasha nor Pass- 
wan Oglou could have appealed to the fanati- 
cism of the Turks to oppose the sultan. Me- 
hemet Ali can and will. Ten years ago, the 
idea even of another than the house of Othman 
reigning over Turkey would have been heresy : 
the question is now openly broached, simply 
because the house of Othman is separating it- 
self from the nation which raised and support- 
ed it. Reason may change the established ha- 
bits of an old people ; despotism rarely can." 

How completely has the event, both in the 
Russian and Egyptian wars, demonstrated the 
truth of these principles ! In the contest in 
Asia Minor, Paskewitch hardly encountered 
any opposition. Rage at the destruction of the 
Janissaries among their numerous adherents 
— indignation among the old population, in 
consequence of the ruin of the dere beys, and 
the suppression of the rights of the cities— 
lukewarmness in the church, from the antici- 
pated innovations in its constitution — general 
dissatisfaction among all classes of Mohamme- 
dans, in consequence of the change in the na- 
tional dress and customs, had so completely 
weakened the feeling of patriotism, and the 
sultan's authority, that the elements of resist- 
ance did not exist. The battles were mere pa- 
rades — the sieges little more than the summon- 
ing of fortresses to surrender. In Europe, the 
ruinous effects of the innovations were also 
painfully apparent. Though the Russians had 
to cross, in a dry and parched season, the path- 
'less and waterless plains of Bulgaria; and 
though, in consequence of the unhealthiness 
of the climate, and the wretched arrangements 
of their commissariat, they lost two hundred 
thousand men by sickness and famine in the 
first campaign, yet the Ottomans, though 
fighting in their own country, and for their 
hearths, were unable to gain any decisive ad- 
vantage. And in the next campaign, when 
they were conducted with more skill, and the 
possession of Varna gave them the advantage 
of a seaport for their supplies, the weakness of 
the Turks was at once apparent. In the battle 
of the 11th June, the loss of the Turks did not 
exceed 4000 men, the forces on neither side 
amounted to forty thousand combatants, and 
vet this, defeat proved fatal to the empire. Of 



this battle, our author gives the following cha- 
racteristic and graphic account: 

" In this position, on the west side of the 
Koulevscha hills, Diebitsch found himself at 
daylight, June 11th, with thirty-six thousand 
men, and one hundred pieces of cannon. He 
disposed them so as to deceive the enemy. 
He posted a division in the valley, its right 
leaning on the cliff, its left supported by re- 
doubts; the remainder of his troops he drew 
up behind the hills, so as to be unseen from 
the ravine; and then with a well-grounded 
hope that not a Turk would escape him, wait- 
ed the grand vizir, who was advancing up the 
defile, totally unconscious that Diebitsch was 
in any other place than before Silistria. He 
had broke up from Pravodi the day before, on 
the receipt of his despatch from Schumla, and 
was followed by the Russian garrison, which 
had been reinforced by a regiment of hussars ; 
but the general commanding it, instead of 
obeying Diebitsch's orders, and quietly track- 
ing him until the battle should have com- 
menced, harassed his rear. To halt and drive 
him back to Pravodi, caused the vizir a delay 
of four hours, without which he would have 
emerged from the defile the same evening, and 
have gained Schumla before Diebitsch got into 
position. 

" In the course of the night the vizir was in- 
formed that the enemy had taken post between 
him and Schumla, and threatened his retreat. 
He might still have avoided the issue of a bat- 
tle, by making his way transversely across the 
defiles to the Kamptchik, sacrificing his bag- 
gage and cannon; but deeming that he had 
only Roth to deal with, he, as in that case was 
his duty, prepared to force a passage; and the 
few troops that he saw drawn up in the valley, 
on gaining the little wood fringing it, in the 
morning, confirmed his opinion. He counted 
on success, yet, to make more sure, halted to 
let his artillery take up a flanking position on 
the north side of the valley. The circuitous 
and bad route, however, delaying this ma- 
noeuvre, he could not restrain the impatience of 
the delhis. Towards noon, 'Allah, Allah her,' 
they made a splendid charge; they repeated it, 
broke two squares, and amused themselves 
nearly two hours in carving the Russian in- 
fantry, their own infantry, the while, admiring 
them from the skirts of the wood. Diebitsch, 
expecting every moment that the vizir would 
advance to complete the success of his cavalry 
—thereby sealing his own destruction— or- 
dered Count Pahlen, whose division was in the 
valley, and who demanded reinforcements, to 
maintain his ground to the last man. The 
Count obeyed, though suffering cruelly; but 
the vizir, fortunately, instead of seconding his 
adversary's intentions, quietly remained on the 
eminence, enjoying the gallantry of his delhis, 
and waiting till his artillery should be able to 
open, when he might descend and claim the 
victory with ease. Another ten minutes would 
have sufficed to envelope him ; but Diebitsch, 
ignorant of the cause of his backwardness, and 
supposing that he intended amusing him till 
ni CT ht, whereby to effect a retreat, and unwilling 
to lose more men, suddenly displayed his 
whole force, and opened a tremendous fire on. 



THE FALL OF TURKEY. 



275 



the astonished Turks. In an instant the rout 
was general, horse and foot ; the latter threw 
away their arms, and many of the nizam dge- 
ditt were seen clinging to the tails of the del- 
hi's horses as they clambered over the hills. 
So complete and instantaneous was the flight, 
that scarcely a prisoner was made. Redschid 
strove to check the panic by personal valour, 
but in vain. He was compelled to draw his 
sabre in self-defence: he fled to the Kamp- 
tchik, accompanied by a score of personal re- 
tainers, crossed the mountains, and on the 
fourth day re-entered Schumla. 

" This eventful battle, fought by the cavalry 
on one side, and a few thousand infantry on 
the other, decided the fate of Turkey — im- 
mense in its consequences, compared with the 
trifling loss sustained, amounting, on the side 
of the Russians, to three thousand killed and 
wounded ; on that of the Turks, killed, wound- 
ed, and prisoners, to about four thousand. Its 
effect, however, was the same as if the whole 
Turkish army had been slain." 

We have given at large the striking account 
of this battle, because it exhibits in the clearest 
point of view the extraordinary weakness to 
which a power was suddenly reduced which 
once kept all Christendom in awe. Thirty-six 
thousand men and a hundred pieces of cannon 
decided the fate of Turkey; and an army of 
Ottomans, forty thousand strong, after sustain- 
ing a loss of four thousand men, was literally 
annihilated. The thing almost exceeds belief. 
To such a state of weakness had the reforms 
of Sultan Mahmoud so soon reduced the Otto- 
man power. Such was the prostration, through 
innovation, of an empire, which, only twenty 
years before, had waged a bloody and doubtful 
war with Russia, and maintained for four cam- 
paigns one hundred and fifty thousand men on 
the Danube. 

6. Among the immediate and most power- 
ful causes of the rapid fall of the Ottoman em- 
pire, unquestionably, must be reckoned the 
Greek Revolution, and the extraordinary part 
which Great Britain took in destroying the 
Turkish navy at Navarino. 

On this subject we wish to speak with 
caution. We have the most heartfelt wish for 
the triumph of the Cross over the Crescent, 
and the liberation of the cradle of civilization 
from Asiatic bondage. But with every desire 
for the real welfare of the Greeks, we must be 
permitted to doubt whether the Revolution was 
the way to effect it, or the cause of humanity 
has not been retarded by the premature effort 
for its independence. 

Since the wars of the French Revolution 
began, the condition and resources of the 
Greeks had improved in as rapid a progression 
as those of the Turks have declined. Various 
causes have contributed to this. 

" The islanders," says Mr. Slade, " it may be 
said, have always been independent, and in 
possession of the coasting trade of the empire. 
The wars attendant on the French Revolution 
gave them the carrying trade of the Mediterra- 
nean ; on the Euxine alone they had above two 
hundred sail under the Russian flag. Their 
vessels even navigated as far as England. 
Mercantile houses were established in the 



principal ports of the continent of Europe ; the 
only duty on their commerce was five per 
cent, ad valorem, to the sultan's custom-houses. 
The great demand of the English merchants 
for Turkish silk, when Italian silk, to which it 
is superior, was difficult to procure, enriched 
the Greeks of the interior, who engrossed the 
entire culture. The continental system obliged 
us to turn to Turkey for corn, large quantities 
of which were exported from Macedonia, from 
Smyrna, and from Tarsus, to the equal profit 
of the Grecian and Turkish agriculturists. 
The same system also rendered it incumbent 
on Germany to cultivate commercial relations 
with Turkey, to the great advantage of the 
Greeks, who were to be seen, in consequence, 
numerously frequenting the fairs at Leipsic. 
Colleges were established over Greece and the 
islands, by leave obtained from Selim III.; 
principally at Smyrna, Scio, Salonica, Yanina, 
and Hydra; and the wealthy sent their children 
to civilized Europe for education, without op- 
position from the Porte, which did not foresee 
the mischief that it would thereby gather. 

" In short, the position of the Greeks, in 1810, 
was such as would have been considered 
visionary twenty years previous, and would, 
if then offered to them, have been hailed as the 
completion of their desires. But the general 
rule, applicable to nations as well as to indi- 
viduals, that an object, however ardently 
aspired after, when attained, is chiefly valued 
as a stepping-stone to higher objects, naturally 
affected them: the possession of unexpected 
prosperity and knowledge opened to them 
further prospects, gave them hopes of realizing 
golden dreams, of revenging treasured wrongs 
— showed them, in a word, the vista of inde- 
pendence." 

These causes fostered the Greek Insur- 
rection, which was secretly organized for 
years before it broke out in 1821, and was then 
spread universally and rendered unquenchable 
by the barbarous murder of the Greek patri- 
arch, and a large proportion of the clergy at 
Constantinople, on Easter Day of that year. 
The result has been, that Greece, after seven 
years of the ordeal of fire and sword, has ob- 
tained its independence ; and by the destruction 
of her navy at Navarino, Turkey has lost the 
means of making any effectual resistance on 
the Black Sea to Russia. Whether Greece has 
been benefited by the change, time alone can 
show. But it is certain that such have been 
the distractions, jealousies, and robberies of 
the Greeks upon each other since that time, 
that numbers of them have regretted that the 
dominion of their country has passed from the 
infidels. 

But whatever may be thought on this sub- 
ject, nothing can be more obvious than that 
the Greek Revolution was utterly fatal to the 
naval power of Turkey; because it deprived 
them at once of the class from which alone 
sailors could be obtained. The whole com 
merce of the Ottomans was carried on by the 
Greeks, and their sailors constituted the entire 
seamen of their fleet. Nothing, accordingly, 
can be more lamentable than the condition of 
the Turkish fleet since that time. The catas- 
trophe of Navarino deprived them of their 



276 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



best ships and bravest sailors ; the Greek revolt 
drained off the whole population who were 
wont to man their fleets. Mr. Slade informs 
us that when he navigated on board the Capi- 
tan Pasha's ship with the Turkish fleet in 
1829, the crews were composed almost entirely 
of landsmen, who were forced on board with- 
out the slightest knowledge of nautical affairs ; 
and that such was their timidity from inex- 
perience of that element, that a few English 
frigates would have sent the whole squadron, 
containing six ships of the line, to the bottom. 
The Russian fleet also evinced a degree of 
ignorance and timidity in the Euxine, which 
could hardly have been expected, from their 
natural hardihood and resolution. Yet, the 
Moscovite fleet, upon the whole, rode triumph- 
ant ; by their capture of Anapa, they struck at 
the great market from whence Constantinople 
is supplied, while, by the storming of Sizepolis, 
they gave a point d'nppvi to Diebitsch on the 
coast within the Balkan, without which he 
could never have ventured to cross that formi- 
dable range. This ruin of the Turkish marine 
by the Greek Revolution and the battle of Na- 
varino, was therefore the immediate cause of 
the disastrous issue of the second Russian cam- 
paign ; and the scale might have been turned, 
and it made to terminate in equal disasters to 
the invaders, if five English ships of the line 
had been added to the Turkish force ; an 
addition, Mr. Slade tells us, which would have 
enabled the Turks to burn the Russian arsenals 
and fleet at Swartopol, and postponed for half 
a century the fall of the Ottoman empire. 

Nothing, therefore, can be more instructive 
than the rapid fall of the Turkish power ; nor 
more curious than the coincidence between the 
despotic acts of the reforming eastern sultan 
and of the innovating European democracies. 
The measures of both have been the same; 
both have been actuatedby the same principles, 
and both yielded to the same ungovernable 
ambition. The sultan commenced his reforms 
by destroying the old territorial noblesse, ruin- 
ing the privileges of corporations, and subvert- 
ing the old military force of the kingdom; and 
he is known to meditate the destruction of the 
Mohammedan hierarchy, and the confiscation 
of the property of the church to the service of the 
public treasury. The Constituent Assembly, 
before they had sat six months, had annihilated 
the feudal nobility, extinguished the privileges 
of corporations, uprooted the military force of 
the monarchy, and confiscated the whole pro- 
perty of the church. The work of destruction 
went on far more smoothly and rapidly in the 
hands of the great despotic democracy, than 
of the eastern sultan ; by the whole forces of 
the state drawing in one direction, the old 
machine was pulled to pieces with a rapidity 
to which there is nothing comparable in the 
annals even of Oriental potentates. The rude 
hand even of Sultan Mahmoud took a lifetime 
to accomplish that which the French demo- 
cracy effected in a few months ; and even his 
ruthless power paused at devastations, which 
they unhesitatingly adopted amidst the applause 
of the nation. Despotism, absolute despotism, 
was the ruling passion of both; the sultan pro- 
claimed the principle that all authority flows 



from the throne, and that every influence must 
be destroyed which does not emanate from that 
source ; " The Rights of Man" publicly an- 
nounced the sovereignty of the people, and 
made every appointment, civil and military, 
flow from their assemblies. So true it is that 
despotism is actuated by the same jealousies, 
and leads to the same measures on the part of 
the sovereign as the multitude; and so just is the 
observation of Aristotle: "The character of 
democracy and despotism is the same. Both 
exercise a despotic authority over the better 
class of citizens ; decrees are in the first, what 
ordinances and arrests are in the last. Though 
placed in different ages or countries, the court 
favourite and democrat are in reality the same 
characters, or at least they always bear a close 
analogy to each other; they have the principal 
authority in their respective forms of govern- 
ment; favourites with the absolute monarch, 
demagogues with the sovereign multitude."* 

The immediate effect of the great despotic 
acts in the two countries, however, was widely 
different. The innovations of Sultan Mah- 
moud being directed against the wishes of the 
majority of the nation, prostrated the strength 
of the Ottomans, and brought the Russian bat- 
talions in fearful strength over the Balkan. 
The innovations of the Constituent Assembly 
being done in obedience to the dictates of the 
people, produced for a time a portentous union 
of revolutionary passions, and carried the Re- 
publican standards in triumph to every capital 
of Europe. It is one thing to force reform 
upon an unwilling people; it is another and a 
very different thing to yield to their wishes in 
imposing it upon a reluctant minority in the 
state. • 

But the ultimate effect of violent innova- 
tions, whether proceeding from the despotism 
of the sultan or the multitude, is the same. 
In both cases they totally destroy the frame of 
society, and prevent the possibility of freedom 
being permanently erected, by destroying the 
classes whose intermixture is essential to its 
existence. The consequences of destroying 
the dere beys, the ayams, the Janissaries, and 
ulema in Turkey, will, in the end, be the same 
as ruining the church, the nobility, the corpo- 
rations, and landed proprietors in France. 
The tendency of both is identical, to destroy 
all authority but that emanating from a single 
power in the state, and of course to render that 
power despotic. It is immaterial whether that 
single power is the primary assemblies of the 
people, or the divan of the sultan ; whether the 
influence to be destroyed is that of the church 
or the ulema, the dere beys or the nobility. In 
either case there is no counterpoise to its au- 
thority, and of course no limit to its oppres- 
sion. As it is impossible, in the nature of 
things, that power should long be exercised by 
great bodies, as they necessarily and rapidly 
fall under despots of their own creation, so it 
is evident that the path is cleared, not only for 
despotism, but absolute despotism, as com- 
pletely by the innovating democracy as the 
resistless sultan. There never was such a 
pioneer for tyranny as the Constituent As- 



* Arist. de Pol. iv. c. 4. 



THE FALL OF TURKEY. 



277 



sembly, they outstripped Sultan Mahmoud 
himself. 

It is melancholy to reflect on the deplorable 
state of weakness to which England has been 
reduced since revolutionary passions seized 
upon her people. Three years ago, the British 
name was universally respected; the Portu- 
guese pointed with gratitude to the well-fought 
fields, where English blood was poured forth 
like water in behalf of their independence; the 
Dutch turned with exultation to the Lion of 
Waterloo, the proud and unequalled monu- 
ment of English fidelity; the Poles acknow- 
ledged with gratitude, that, amidst all their 
sorrows, England alone had stood their friend, 
and exerted its influence at the Congress of 
Vienna to procure for them constitutional 
freedom; even the Turks, though mourning 
the catastrophe of Navarino, acknowledged 
that British diplomacy had at length interfered 
and turned aside from Constantinople the 
sword of Russia, after the barrier of the Bal- 
kan had been broke through. Now, how wo- 
ful is the change! The Portuguese recount, 
with undisguised indignation, the spoliation 
of their navy by the tricolour fleet, then in 
close alliance with England; and the fostering 
by British blood and treasure, of a cruel and 
insidious civil war in their bosom, in aid of 
the principle of revolutionary propagandism. 
The Dutch, with indignant rage, tell the tale 
of the desertion by England of the allies and 
principles for which she had fought for a hun- 
dred and fifty years, and the shameful union 
of the Leopard and the Eagle, to crush the 
independence and partition the territories of 
Holland. The Polish exiles in foreign lands 
dwell on the heart-rending story of their 
wrongs, and narrate how they were led on by 
deceitful promises from France and England 
to resist, till the period of capitulation had 
gone by; the eastern nations deplore the occu- 
pation of Constantinople by the Russians, and 
hold up their hands in astonishment at the in- 
fatuation which has led the mistress of the 
seas to permit the keys of the Dardanelles to 
be placed in the grasp of Moscovite ambition. 
It is in vain to conceal the fact, that by a mere 
change of ministry, by simply letting loose 
revolutionary passions, England has descended 
to the rank of a third-rate power. She has 
sunk at once, without any external disasters, 
from the triumphs of Trafalgar and Waterloo, 
to the disgrace and the humiliation of Charles 
II. It is hard to say whether she is most 
despised or insulted by her ancient allies or 
enemies; whether contempt and hatred are 
strongest among those she aided or resisted 
in the late struggle. Russia defies her in the 
east, and, secure in the revolutionary pas- 
sions by which her people are distracted, pur- 
sues with now undisguised anxiety her long- 
cherished aud stubbornly-resisted schemes of 
ambition in the Dardanelles. France drags 
her a willing captive at her chariot-wheels, 
and compels the arms which once struck down 
Napoleon to aid her in all the mean revolu- 
tionary aggressions she is pursuing on the 
surrounding states. Portugal and Holland, 
smarting under the wounds received from 
their oldest ally, wait for the moment of British 



weakness to wreak vengeance for the wrongs 
inflicted under the infatuated guidance of the 
whig democracy. Louis XIV., humbled by 
the defeats of Blenheim and Ramillies, yet 
spurned with indignation at the proposal that 
he should join his arms to those of his ene- 
mies, to dispossess his ally, the King of 
Spain; but England, in the hour of her great- 
est triumph, has submitted to a greater degra- 
dation. She has deserted and insulted the 
nation which stood by her side in the field of 
Vittoria; she has joined in hostility against 
the power which bled with her at Waterloo, 
and deserted in its last extremity the ally 
whose standards waved triumphant with her 
on the sands of Egypt. 

The supineness and weakness of ministers 
in the last agony of Turkey have been such as 
would have exceeded belief, if woful experi- 
ence had not taught us to be surprised at no- 
thing which they can do. France acted with 
becoming foresight and spirit; they had an 
admiral, with four ships of the line, to watch 
Russia in the Dardanelles, when the crisis ap- 
proached. What had England] One ship of the 
line on the way from Malta, and a few frigates 
in the Archipelago, were all that the mistress 
of the waves could afford, to support the hon- 
our and interests of England, in an emergency 
more pressing than any which has occurred 
since the battle of Trafalgar. Was the crisis 
not foreseen 1 Everyman in the country of 
any intelligence foresaw it, from the moment 
that Ibrahim besieged Acre. Can England 
only fit out one ship of the line to save the 
Dardanelles from Russia? Is this the fore- 
sight of the Whigs, or the effect of the dock- 
yard reductions 1 Or has the reform act 
utterly annihilated our strength, and sunk our 
name 1 

It is evident that in the pitiable shifts to 
which government is now reduced, foreign 
events, even of the greatest magnitude, have 
no sort of weight in its deliberations. Resting 
on the quicksands of popular favour; intent 
only on winning the applause or resisting the 
indignation of the rabble; dreading the strokes 
of their old allies among the political unions; 
awakened, when too late, to a sense of the 
dreadful danger arising from the infatuated 
course they have pursued ; hesitating between 
losing the support of the revolutionists and 
pursuing the anarchical projects which they 
avow; unable to command the strength of the 
nation for any foreign policy; having sown 
the seeds of interminable dissension between 
the different classes of society, and spread far 
and wide the modern passion for innovation 
in lieu of the ancient patriotism of England; 
they have sunk it at once into the gulf of de- 
gradation. By the passions they have excited 
in the empire, its strength is utterly destroyed, 
and well do foreign nations perceive its weak- 
ness. They know that Ireland is on the verge 
of rebellion ; that the West Indies, with the 
torch and the tomahawk at their throats, are 
waiting only for the first national reverse to 
throw off their allegiance; that the s-plendid 
empire of India is shaking under the demo- 
cratic rule to which it is about to be subjected 
on the expiry of the charter ; that the dock- 
2 A 



27S 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



yards, stripped of their stores to make a show 
of economy, and conceal a sinking revenue, 
could no longer fit out those mighty fleets 
which so recently went forth from their gates, 
conquering and to conquer. The foreign his- 
torians of the French revolutionary war de- 
plored the final seal it had put upon the 
maritime superiority of England, and declared 
that human sagacity could foresee no possible 
extrication of the seas from her resistless do- 
minion : but how vain are the anticipations 
of human wisdom! The fickle change of 
popular opinion subverted the mighty fabric ; 
a Whig ministry succeeded to the helm, and 
before men had ceased to tremble at the thun- 
der of Trafalgar, England had become con- 
temptible on the waves ! 

From this sad scene of national degradation 
and decay, from the melancholy spectacle of 
the breaking up, from revolutionary passion 
and innovation, of the greatest and most bene- 
ficent empire that ever existed upon earth, we 
turn to a more cheering prospect, and joyfully 
inhale from the prospects of the species those 
hopes which we can no longer venture to 
cherish for our own country. 

The attention of all classes in this country 
has been so completely absorbed of late years 
by the progress of domestic changes, and the 
march of revolution, that little notice has been 
bestowed on the events we have been consider- 
ing; yet they are more important to the future 
fate of the species, than even the approaching 
dismemberment of the British empire. We 
are about to witness the overfhroAV of the Mo- 
hammedan religion ; the emancipation of the 
cradle of civilization from Asiatic bondage; 
the accomplishment of that deliverance of the 
Holy Sepulchre, for which the Crusaders toiled 
and bled in vain ; the elevation of the cross on 
the Dome of St. Sophia and the walls of Je- 
rusalem. 

That this great event was approaching has 
been long foreseen by the thoughtful and the 
philanthropic. The terrors of the Crescent 
have long since ceased: it first paled in the 
Gulf of Lepanto : it waned before the star of 
Sobieski under the walls of Vienna, and set in 
flames in the Bay of Navarino. The power 
which once made all Christendom tremble, 
which shook the imperial throne, and pene- 
trated from the sands of Arabia to the banks 
of the Loire, is now in the agonies of dissolu- 
tion ; and that great deliverance for which the 
banded chivalry of Europe fought for cen- 
turies, and to attain which millions of Chris- 
tian bones whitened the fields of Asia, is now 
about to be effected through the vacillation and 
indifference of their descendants. That which 
the courage of Richard Coeur de Lion, and the 
enthusiasm of Godfrey of Bouillon, could not 
achieve; which resisted the arms of the Tem- 
plars and the Hospitallers, and rolled back from 
Asia the tide of European invasion, is now in 
the act of being accomplished. A more me- 
morable instance was never afforded of the 
manner in which the passions and vices of 
men are made to work out the intentions of 
an overruling Providence, and of the vanity 
of all human attempts to prevent that cease- 



less spread of religion which has been decreed 
by the Almighty. 

That Russia is the power by whom this 
great change was to be effected, by whose arm 
the tribes of Asia were to be reduced to sub- 
jection, and the triumph of civilization over 
barbaric sway effected, has long been appa- 
rent. The gradual but unceasing pressure 
of the hardy races of mankind upon the effe- 
minate, of the energy of northern poverty on 
the corruption of southern opulence, rendered 
it evident that this change must ultimately be 
effected. The final triumph of the Cross over 
the Crescent was secure from the moment that 
the Turcoman descended to the plains of Asia 
Minor, and the sway of the Czar was estab- 
lished in the deserts of Scythia. As certainly 
as water will ever descend from the mountains 
to the plain, so surely will the stream of per- 
manent conquest, in every age, flow from the 
northern to the southern races of mankind. 

But although the continued operation of 
these causes was evident, and the ultimate as- 
cendent of the religion of Christ, and the insti- 
tutions of civilization, over the tenets of 
Mohammed, and the customs of barbarism, 
certain ; yet many different causes, till within 
these few years, contributed to check their ef- 
fects, and to postpone, apparently, for an in- 
definite period, the final liberation of the 
eastern world. But the weakness, insanity, 
and vacillation of England and France, while 
they will prove fatal to them, seem destined to 
subject the east to the sway of Russia, and re- 
new, in the plains of Asia, those institutions 
of which Europe has become unworthy. The 
cause of religion, the spread of the Christian 
faith, has received an impulse from the vices 
and follies, which she never received from the 
sword of western Europe. The infidelity and 
irreligion of the French philosophers have 
done that for the downfall of Islamism which 
all the enthusiasm of the Crusaders could not 
accomplish. Their first effect was to light up 
a deadly war in Europe, and array the civilized 
powers of the world in mortal strife against 
each other; but this was neither their only nor 
their final effect. In this contest, the arms of 
civilization acquired an unparalleled ascend- 
ency over those of barbarism; and at its close, 
the power of Russia was magnified fourfold. 
Turkey and Persia were unable to withstand the 
empire from which the arms of Napoleon rolled 
back. The overthrow of Mohammedanism, 
the liberation of the finest provinces of Europe 
from Turkish sway, flowed at last, directly and 
evidently, from the rise of the spirit which at 
first closed all the churches of France, and 
erected the altar of reason in the choir of Notre 
Dame. We are now witnessing the conclu- 
sion of the drama. When England descended 
from her high station, and gave way to revo- 
lutionary passions ; when irreligion tainted her 
people, and respect for the institutions of their 
fathers no longer influenced her government, 
she, too, was abandoned to the consequences 
of her vices; and from her apostasy, fresh 
support derived to the cause of Christianity. 
French irreligion had quadrupled the military 
strength of Russia : but the English navy still 



THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820. 



279 



existed to uphold the tottering edifice of Turk- 
ish power. English irreligion and infidelity 
overturned her constitution, and the barrier 
was swept away. 

The British navy, paralysed by democracy 
and divisions in the British islands, can no 
longer resist Moscovite ambition, and the pros- 
tration of Turkey is in consequence complete. 
The effects will in the end be fatal to England; 
but they may raise up in distant lands other 
empires, which may one day rival even the 
glories of the British name. The cross may 
cease to be venerated at Paris, but it will be 
elevated at St. Sophia: it may be ridiculed in 



London, but it will resume its sway at Antioch. 
Considerations of this kind are fitted, if any 
can, to console us for the degradation and ca- 
lamities of our own country: they show, that 
if one nation becomes corrupted, Providence 
can derive, even from its vices and ingrati- 
tude, the means of raising up other states to 
the glory of which it has become unworthy: 
and that from the decay of civilization in its 
present seats, the eye of hope may anticipate its 
future resurrection in the cradle from whence 
it originally spread its blessings throughout 
the world. 



THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820/ 



There is no subject with which we are more 
completely unacquainted, or which has been 
more perverted by artful deception on the part 
of the revolutionary press throughout Europe, 
than the convulsions, which, since the general 
peace, have distracted the Spanish Peninsula. 
Circumstances have been singularly favour- 
able to the universal diffusion of erroneous 
views on this subject. The revolutionary 
party had a fair field for the adoption of every 
kind of extravagance, and the propagation of 
every species of falsehood, in a country where 
the ruling class, who opposed the movement, 
had committed great errors, been guilty of 
black ingratitude, and were totally incapable 
of counteracting, by means of the press, those 
erroneous misrepresentations, with which the 
indefatigable activity of the revolutionary 
party overwhelmed the public mind in every 
part of the world. Their exertions, and the 
success which they have met with, in this re- 
spect, have accordingly been unprecedented ; 
and there is no subject on which historic truth 
will be found to be so different from journal 
misrepresentation, as the transactions of the 
Peninsula during the last fifteen years. 

That Ferdinand VII. is a weak man; that, 
under the government of the priests, he has 
violated his promises, behaved cruelly towards 
his deliverers, and been guilty of black ingrati- 
tude towards the heroic defenders of his throne 
during his exile, may be considered as histori- 
cally certain. How, then, has it happened that 
the Revolution has retrograded in a country 
where so much was required to be done in the 
way of real amelioration, and the wishes of so 
large a portion of its inhabitants were unani- 
mous in favour of practical improvement? 
How can we explain the fact, that the French, 
in 1823, led by the Duke d'An^ouleme, under 
the weak and vacillating direction of the Bour- 
bons, traversed the Peninsula from end to end, 
without even the shadow of resistance, and es- 
tablished their standard on the walls of Cadiz, 
after the'heroic resistance which the peasantry 
of the Peninsula made to Gallic agression 



* Essai Historinnp sur la Revolution d'Esna-rnn, par 
le Vii-ointe tie Martignac, Paris, Pinard, 1832. Black- 
Wood's Magazine, September, 1S32. 



under Napoleon, and the universal hatred 
which their presence had excited in every part 
of that desolated and blood-stained country] 
Immense must have been the injustice, enor- 
mous the folly, ruinous the sway of the revolu- 
tionary party, when it so soon cured a whole 
nation of a desire for change, which all at first 
felt to be necessary, which so many were 
throughout interested in promoting, and which 
was begun with such unanimous support from 
all classes. 

The Revolutionists explain this extraordi- 
nary fact, by saying that it was entirely owing 
to the influence of the priests, who, seeing that 
their power and possessions were threatened 
by the proposed innovations, set themselves 
vigorously and successfully to oppose them. 
But here again historical facts disprove party 
misrepresentations. It will be found, upon 
examination, that the priests at the outset made 
no resistance whatever to the establishment of 
the constitution on the most democratic basis ; 
that the experiment of a highly popular form 
of government was tried with the unanimous 
approbation of all classes; and that the subse- 
quent general horror at the constitutionalists, 
and the easy overthrow of their government, 
was owing to the madness of the popular rulers 
themselves, to the enormous injustice which 
they committed, the insane projects of innova- 
tion in which they indulged, and the weighty 
interests in all ranks, on which, in the prose- 
cution of their frantic career, they were com- 
pelled to trench. Spain, when the veil is 
drawn aside which party delusions has so long 
spread before its transactions, will be found to 
add another confirmation to the eternal truths. 
that the career of innovation necessarily and 
rapidly destroys itself; that the misery it im- 
mediately produces renders the great body of 
men at length deaf to the delusive promises by 
which its promoters never fail to bolster up its 
fortunes, and that there is no such fatal enemy 
to real freedom as the noisy supporters of de- 
mocratic ambition. 

The work, whose title is prefixed to this ar- 
ticle, is well calculated to disabuse the public 
mind in regard to these important transactions. 
The author is one of the liberal party in Frauce, 



280 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



and bestows liberal and unqualified abuse 
upon all the really objectionable parts of Fer- 
dinand's conduct. At the same time, he un- 
folds, in clear and graphic colours, the ruinous 
precipitance and fatal innovations of the Re- 
volutionists, and distinctly demonstrates that 
it was not the priests nor the nobles, but their 
own injustice, and the wide-spread ruin pro- 
duced by their own measures, which occa- 
sioned the speedy downfall of the absurd con- 
stitution which they had established. 

We all recollect that the new constitution 
of Spain was framed in the Isle of Leon, in 
1812, when the greater part of the Peninsula 
was overrun by the French troops. M. Mar- 
tignac gives the following account of the origi- 
nal formation of the Cortes in that island, to 
whom the important task of framing a consti- 
tution was devolved: — 

"The greater part of the Spanish territory 
was at this period overrun by the French ; 
Cadiz, Gallicia, Murcia, and the Belearic Isles, 
alone elected their representatives : No condi- 
tion was imposed on the electors, but every one who 
presented himself ivas allowed to vote. The depu- 
ties from the other provinces were elected by 
an equally universal suffrage of all their inhabi- 
tants who had taken refuge in the Isle of Leon ; 
and thus the Cortes was at length assembled. 
Such was the origin of the assembly which 
gave to Spain its democratic constitution. 

"We cannot now read without surprise, 
mingled with pity, the annals of that assembly, 
and the monuments it has left for the instruc- 
tion of all nations, a prey to the same passions, 
and the victims of the same fury. The bloody 
annals of our Convention can alone give an 
idea of it; but to the revolutionary fanaticism 
which they shared with us, we must add, the 
influence of a burning sun over their heads, 
and the force of implacable animosities, nou- 
rished by the Moorish blood which flowed in 
their veins. All the recollections of our dis- 
asters were there cited, not as beacons to be 
avoided, but examples to be followed: all the 
men whose names are never pronounced 
amongst us but with an involuntary feeling of 
horror, were there cited as heroes, and pro- 
posed as models ; all the measures of proscrip- 
tion and destruction which vengeance, inspir- 
ed by hatred, could suggest, were there pro- 
posed and supported. One declared that in his 
eyes the hatchet of the executioner was the 
sole argument which he would deign to propose 
to the logic of his adversaries; another, and 
that was a priest, offered to take the axe into 
his own hands; a third, indignant at the scan- 
dal which Spain had so long exhibited, ex- 
claimed, 'We have been assembled for six 
months, and not one head has as yet fallen.' 

" In the midst of these manifestations of a 
furious delirium, some prudent and sagacious 
voices were heard, and united among each 
other to moderate the popular effervescence, 
which such pains had been taken to excite. 
Among those who executed with most success 
this honourable task, the voice of Arguelles 
was especially distinguished ; of that Arguel- 
les, whose mind, chastened by reflection, and 
enlightened by study, had subdued these ex- 
travagant ideas ; whose eloquence at once cap- 



tivated and entranced his auditors ; and who, 
in a time and a place where any thing ap- 
proaching to moderation was stigmatized as 
blasphemy, had obtained the extraordinary 
surname of the Divine. 

" Nothing, however, could arrest the torrent 
of democracy which had now broken through 
all its bounds. The Cortes had been convoked 
to overturn the foundations of the Spanish 
monarchy, and consummate the work of the 
Revolution, and nothing could prevent the 
task being accomplished. From the day of 
their first meeting, they had proclaimed the 
principle, that sovereignly resides in the na- 
tion ; and all their acts were the consequences 
of that principle. The national and rational 
party, whose conviction and good sense it out- 
raged, were far from adopting so extravagant 
a proposition, and in ordinary circumstances 
they would have rejected it; but all their pro- 
testations and remonstrances were overturned, 
by pointing to their young king, a captive in 
a foreign land, and incessantly invoking the 
principle of popular sovereignty, as the sole 
method of awakening that general enthusiasm, 
which might ultimately deliver him from his 
fetters. The peril of foreign subjugation was 
such, that nothing tending to calm the public 
effervescence could be admitted; and the firm- 
est royalists were, by an unhappy fatality, com- 
pelled to embrace principles subversive of the 
throne. 

" The Cortes, therefore, was compelled to 
advance in the career on which it had entered, 
deliberating on the great interests of Spain 
under the irresistible influence of a furious and 
democratic press, and under the pressure of po- 
pular speeches delivered by the visionary and 
enthusiastic from all the provinces, who soon 
made Cadiz their common centre. 

"It was in the midst of that fiery furnace 
that the constitution of Spain was forged : in 
! the bosom of that crisis, the centre of that fer- 
mentation, in the absence of all liberty of thought 
and action, from the vehemence of the popular party, 
] that the solemn act was adopted which was to 
regulate the destiny of a great people." — I. 
94—97. 

A constitution struck out in such a period 
of foreign danger and domestic deliverance, 
under the dread of French bayonets and the 
pressure of revolutionary fury, could hardly 
be expected to be either rational or stable, or 
adapted to the character and wants of the peo- 
ple. It was accordingly in the highest degree 
democratical ; not only infinitely more so than 
Spain could bear, but more so than any state 
in Europe, not excepting England or France, 
could adopt with the slightest chance of safety. 
Its leading articles were as follows: — 

" 1. The sovereignty resides in the nation. 

" 2. The Cortes is to be elected by the uni- 
versal svffrage of the whole inhabitants. 

"3. It possesses alone the legislative power, 
which comprises the sole power of proposing 
laws. It votes the taxes and the levies for the 
army; lays down all the regulations for the 
armed force ; names the supreme judges ; 
creates and institutes a regent, in case of mi- 
nority or incapacity, of which last it alone 
is the judge, and exercises a direct control 



THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820. 



281 



over the ministers and all other functionaries, 
whose responsibility it alone regulates. Dur- 
ing the intervals of its sessions, it is repre- 
sented by a, permanent deputation, charged with 
the execution of the laws, and the power of 
convoking it, in case of necessity. 

"4. The king is inviolable. He sanctions 
the laws; but he can only refuse his assent 
twice, and to different legislatures. On the 
third bill being presented, he ?nust. give his con- 
sent. He has the right of pardon ; but that 
right is circumscribed within certain limits 
fixed by law. 

"5. The king names the public functiona- 
ries, but from a list presented to him by the council 
of state. The whole functionaries are subject 
to a supreme tribunal, the members of which 
are all appointed by the Cortes. 

" 6. The king cannot leave the kingdom 
without the leave of the Cortes ; and if he mar- 
ries without their consent, he is held by that 
act alone to have abdicated the throne. 

" 7. There is to be constantly attached to 
the king's person a council of forty members. 
Three counsellors are for life, named by the 
king, but from a list furnished by the Cortes, 
in which there can only be four of the great 
nobles, and four ecclesiastics. It is this coun- 
cil which presents the lists for all employments 
in church and state to the king, for his selec- 
tion. 

"8. No part of the new constitution is to be 
revised in any of its parts, but by the votes of 
three successive legislatures, and by a decree 
of the Cortes, not subject to the royal sanction." 
I. 97—99. 

Such was the Spanish constitution of 1812, 
to the restoration of which, all the subsequent 
convulsions of the Revolutionary party have 
been directed. It was evidently in the highest 
degree democratical : so much so, indeed, that the 
President of the American Congress has fully 
as much real power. The Cortes was elected 
by universal suffrage : there was no upper cham- 
ber or House of Peers to restrain its excesses ; 
it was alone invested with the right of voting 
the taxes, raising the army, and establishing its 
regulations; it controlled and directed all the 
public functionaries, and its powers were en- 
joyed, during the periods of its prorogation, 
by a permanent committee, which had the power 
at any time, of its own authority, to reassemble 
the whole body. By means of the Council of 
State substantially elected by the Cortes, and 
the lists which it presented to the king for the 
choice of all public functionaries, it was in- 
vested with the power of naming all officers, 
civil, military, ecclesiastical, and judicial; and, 
to complete this mass of democratic absurdity, 
this constitution could not be altered in any 
of its parts but by the concurring act of three 
successive legislatures, and a decree of the 
Cortes, not subject to the royal sanction. It is 
needless to say any thing of this constitution ; 
it was much more democratical than the con- 
stitution of France in 1790, which was so soon 
overturned by the Revolutionists of that coun- 
try, and was of such a kind as could not, by 
possibility, have failed to precipitate the Pe- 
ninsula into all the horrors of anarchy. 

The ultimate fate of such a mass of revolu- 
36 



tionary madness, in a country so little accus- 
tomed to bear the excitement, and so little 
aware of the duties of freedom as Spain, might 
easily have been anticipated. Its early recep- 
tion in the different classes of the community 
is thus described by our author: — 

"To those who are aware of the true spirit 
of that grave and constant nation, and who 
were not blinded by the passions or the excita- 
tion of political fanaticism, it was easy to fore- 
see the reception which a constitution would 
receive, by which all the habits of the nation 
were violated, and all their affections wounded. 

" At Cadiz, Barcelona, and, in general, in all 
the great commercial towns, the party who 
had urged forward the Revolution readily pre- 
vailed over the adherents of old institutions, 
and these towns expressed their adhesion with 
enthusiasm; but in the smaller boroughs in 
the country, and, above all, in the provinces 
of the interior, where the new ideas had not 
yet made any progress, this total prostration 
of the Royalty — this substitution of a new 
power instead of that which had been the 
object of ancient veneration, was received 
with a coldness which soon degenerated into 
discontent and open complaints. 

" In vain the innovators sought to persuade 
the people, whose dissatisfaction could no lon- 
ger be concealed, that the new constitution 
was but a restoration of the ancient principles of 
the monarchy, adapted to the new wants and 
exigencies of society ; in vain had they taken 
care, in destroying things, to preserve names ; 
this deceitful address deceived no one, and 
abated nothing of the public discontent. 

"The clergy, discontented and disquieted at 
the prospect of a future which it was now easy 
to foresee — the great proprietors, who were 
subjected to new burdens, at the same time 
that they were deprived of their ancient rights 
— the members of all the provincial councils 
which were despoiled of their ancient juris- 
dictions, added to the public discontent. The 
creation of a direct tax, unknown till that day, 
appeared to the inhabitants of the country an 
intolerable burden — a sacrifice without any 
compensation; and as the burden of the war 
became more heavy as it continued in dura- 
tion, these two causes of suffering worked the 
discontent of the people up to perfect fury." — 
100, 101. 

The universal discontent at the new consti- 
tution broke out into open expressions of de- 
testation, when the king, liberated from the 
gra^p of Napoleon, entered Spain in 1814. 

" The king entered Spain in the midst of the 
transports of public joy at his deliverance, and 
advanced to Valencia, where he was pro- 
claimed by the army under General Elio. 

" From the frontiers to Valencia, Ferdinand 
heard nothing but one continued anathema and 
malediction against the constitution. From 
all sides he received petitions, memorials, ad- 
dresses, in which he was besought to annul 
what had been done during his captivity, and 
to reign over Spain as his fathers had reigned. 
There was not a village through which he 
passed which did not express a similar wish, 
subscribed by men of all ranks, and even by 
the members of the municipalities created by 
2a2 



282 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



the constitution. The army held the same 
language ; and those who had shed their blood 
for the defence of the throne, demanded, with 
loud cries, 'that the throne should be pre- 
served pure, and without spot; and that, as 
formerly, it should be powerful, firm, and ho- 
noured.' 

"The minority of the Cortes joined their 
voice to the many others which met the king's 
ears, and presented the same wishes and peti- 
tions. These members with that view signed 
a petition, since well known under the name 
of the Protestation of the Fathers. Sixty-nine 
deputies, named by the constitution, suppli- 
cated the king to destroy the act to which all 
classes had so recently been bound by a so- 
lemn oath."— I. 107 — 109. 

The result of this unanimous feeling was 
the famous decree of Valencia of May 6, 1814, 
by which the monarch annulled the constitu- 
tion which he had recently accepted in exile. 
The Cortes made several efforts to resist the 
change, but the public indignation over- 
whelmed them all. 

" Resistance to the royal edict was speedily 
found to be a chimera. The torrent accumu- 
lated as it advanced, and no person in the 
state was able to stand against it. After the 
publication of the Edict of Valencia, the king 
marched to Madrid ; and he found, wherever 
he went, the people in a state of insurrection 
against the constitutional authorities, the pil- 
lars of the constitution overturned and broken, 
and the absolute king proclaimed. Everywhere 
the soldiers, sent by the Cortes to restrain the 
transports of the people, joined their acclama- 
tions to theirs. It was in the midst of that 
cortege, which was swelled by the population 
of ev-:ry village through which he passed, that 
Ferdinand traversed the space between Va- 
lencia and Madrid ; and it was surrounded by 
a population more ardent and impassioned 
even than that of the 13th May, that he made 
one of those memorable entries into his capi- 
tal which seemed to promise a long and tran- 
quil futurity. 

"Thus fell this imprudent and ephemeral 
constitution, cradled amidst troubles and war, 
prepared without reflection, discussed without 
freedom, founded on opinions and sentiments 
which were strangers to the soil, applied to a 
people for whom it was neither made nor 
adapted, and which could not survive the cri- 
sis in which it had been conceived." — I. 120 
121. 

Thus terminated the first act of this unhap- 
py drama. From the rash and absurd inno- 
vations, the democratic invasions and total 
destruction of the old form of government, by 
the revolutionary party, the maintenance even 
of moderate and regulated f eedom had become 
impossible. In two years the usual career of 
revolution had been run; liberty had perished 
under the frantic innovations of its own sup- 
porters ; its excesses were felt to be more 
formidable than the despotism of absolute 
power, and for shelter from a host of vulgar 
tyrants, the people ran to the shadow of the 
throne. 

The cruel and unjustifiable use which the 
absolute monarch made of this violent reac- 



tion in favour of monarchical institutions, the 
base ingratitude which he evinced to the popu- 
lar supporters of his throne during his exile, 
and the enormous iniquities which were prac- 
tised upon the fallen party of the liberals, are 
universally known. These excesses gave the 
revolutionary party too good reason to com- 
plain ; they pointed out in clear colours the 
perils of unfettered power; they awakened the 
sympathies of the young and the generous in 
every part of the world, in favour of the un- 
happy victims of regal vengeance, whose 
blood was shed on the scaffold, or who were 
languishing in captivity ; and therefore, if any 
events could do so, they left a fair field for the 
efforts of the constitutional party. Yet, even 
with such advantages, and the immense addi- 
tion of power consequent on the defection of 
the army, the revolutionary party, after being 
again called to the helm of affairs, again pe- 
rished under the weight of their own revolu- 
tionary passions and absurd innovations. 

The events which soon followed ; the insur- 
rection of Riego, the revolt of the troops as- 
sembled in the Island of Leon for the South 
American expedition in 1820, and the compul- 
sory acceptance of the democratic constitution 
of 1812 by the absolute king, are familiar to 
all our readers. The effects of this complete 
and bloodless triumph of democracy are what 
chiefly concern the people of this country, and 
they are painted in lucid colours by our author. 

"As soon as the constitution had been ac- 
cepted of by the king, its establishment expe- 
rienced no serious resistance in the kingdom. 
The great nobles, accustomed to follow the or- 
ders of a master, hesitated not to follow his 
example. In the principal towns, all those en- 
gaged in commerce, industry, and the liberal 
professions, testified their adherence with the 
most lively satisfaction. The army expressed 
its devotion to the constitutional standard 
which it had erected, and evinced its determi- 
nation to support it by the formidable weapons 
of force. The needy and idle ; all who were 
bankrupt, in labouring circumstances, or des- 
titute of the industrious habits necessary to 
secure a subsistence, flew with avidity to the 
support of a system, which promised them the 
spoils of the state. The dignified clergy and 
the monks beheld with grief the triumph of the 
theories which they condemned ; but neverthe- 
less the}'' obeyed in silence. The magistracy 
followed their example. As to the people pro- 
perly so called, that is to say, the industrious 
inhabitants of the towns, the peaceable culti- 
vators of the fields, they regarded the change 
with disquietude and distrust, took no active 
share in promoting it, and awaited the course 
of events to decide their judgment." — I. 203. 

The usual effects of democratic ascendency 
were not long in proclaiming themselves. 

"The sixty-nine deputies of the old Cortes, 
who had signed the address to the king recom- 
mending the overthrow of the constitution, 
were everywhere arrested and thrown into 
prison. This was the first indication of what 
the constitutionalists understood by the am- 
nesty which they had proclaimed. 

" Whilst at Madrid, the royal government, de- 
prived of all moral force, feebly struggled 



THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1920. 



283 



against the popular power, which had arisen 
by its side ; whilst the patriotic societies over- 
turned or displaced the local authorities, in- 
sulted the majesty of the throne and the royal 
authority, preached license and proclaimed 
disorder; whilst violence was organized, and 
anarchy systematically constituted, the pro- 
vinces did not afford a more cheering ex- 
ample, and in that circle of fire into which 
Spain was now resolved, the extremities show- 
ed themselves not less inflamed than the centre. 
There could be discerned, by the prophetic eyes 
of wisdom, the black speck which was soon to 
enlarge and overwhelm the kingdom with the 
horrors of civil war. 

" In a great proportion of the provinces, 
separate juntas were formed, while some dis- 
regarded alike the authority of government 
and that of the supreme assembly. Each of 
these assemblies deliberated, interpreted, acted 
according to the disposition of the majority of 
its members, and no central authority felt it- 
self sufficiently strong to venture to subject to 
any common yoke the local parliaments, each 
of which, in its own little sphere, had mure 
influence than the central alone possessed." — 
1.211. 

Amidst the general transports of the revolu- 
tionary party at this unexpected change, the 
usual and invariable attendant or revolution- 
ary convulsions, embarrassments of finance, were 
soon experienced. The way in which this un- 
dying load precipitated the usual consequences 
of revolutionary triumph, national bankrupt- 
cy, and a confiscation of the properly of the 
church, is thus detailed: — 

"No sooner was the new Cortes installed, 
than numerous and important cares occupied 
their attention. Of these, the most pressing 
was the stale of the finances. Disinterestedness 
is not in general the distinctive character of 
the leaders of party, and the countries deliv- 
ered by revolutions usually are not long of 
discovering what it has cost them. In vain 
the ministry, in vain the Cortes, terrified at the 
daily increasing deficit in the public treasury, and 
the absence of all resources to supply it, 
sought to reduce, by economical reductions, 
those charges which the state could evidently 
no longer support. While reductions were 
effected in one quarter, additional charges 
multiplied in another. All those who could 
make out the shadow of a claim of loss arising 
from the arbitrary government ; all those whose 
hands had touched, to raise it up, the pillar of 
the constitution, had restitutions or indemnities 
to claim, without prejudice to arrears, and new 
places to demand. Refusal was out of the 
question ; for it would have been considered as 
a denial of justice, an act of ingratitude, a 
proof of servility. Jlmidst the public transports 
the revenue was incessantly going down." 

It became absolutely indispensable, there- 
fore, to provide new resources ; but where was 
a government to find them, destitute of credit, 
in a country without industry and without com- 
merce 1 The expedient of a patriotic loan was 
tried, but that immediately and totally failed. 
The patriots all expected to receive, not to be 
called upon to give money to government. Re- 
course was then, from sheer necessity, had to 



the most fatal of all measures, — to one of those 
which at once ruin the present, and destroy all 
prospects for the future. They made a separa- 
tion between all arrears, or existing debt, and 
the current expenses of the year, and appro- 
priated to this last the whole revenue of the state, — 
that is to say, they proclaimed public bank- 
ruptcy as to the national debt, and thus inflicted 
on public and private credit one of those mor- 
tal stabs from which they never recover. 

"Having thus got quit of the debt, the next 
object was to bring up the income to the ex- 
penditure of the year. For this purpose, they 
re-established the direct and burdensome land-tax, 
which had been abandoned on the restoration 
of royalty, in 1814, and created various new 
taxes, most of which, from their extreme unpo- 
pularity, they were soon compelled to abandon. 

" They next established on the frontier a line 
of custom-houses, with a rigour of prohibition 
which could hardly be conceived in an indus- 
trious country, which was unintelligible in 
Spain, and was speedily followed by the esta- 
blishment, on the frontier, of a system of 
smuggling, the most vast and organized that 
ever existed. 

" Finally, they abolished, the tithes and feudal 
tenths, but established the half of them for the 
service of the state. This was immediately at- 
tended with the worst effects. The ecclesias- 
tical tithe was the burden, of all others, which 
was most regularly and cheerfully paid in 
Spain, because the people were accustomed to 
it, and they conceived that, in paying it, they 
discharged at once a legal obligation and a 
debt of conscience ; but when it was converted 
into a burden merely available to the ordinary 
wants of the state, it was no longer regarded 
in that light, but as an odious charge, and its 
collection was instantly exposed to the increas- 
ing embarrassments of the other imposts. 

"At the time that they voted these different 
financial expedients, their total inadequacy 
was obvious to the most inconsiderate; and it 
soon became evident that additional resources 
were unavoidable."— I. 230, 231. 

Thus the first effect of the triumph of revo- 
lution in Spain, was the imposition of a heavy 
income-tax, the destruction of the public debt, and 
the confiscation of tithes, and a large portion of the 
land rights of the kingdom, to the service of the 
treasury. One simple and irresistible cause 
produced these effects, — the failure of the re- 
venue, — invariably consequent on the suspen- 
sion of industry, the failure of credit, and con- 
traction of expenditure, which result from 
popular triumph. 

The rapid progress of innovation in every 
other department, in consequence of the re-es- 
tablishment of the democratic constitution, 
speedily unhinged all the institutions of society. 
Its effect is thus detailed by our author: — 

"Independent of the financial measures of 
which I have given an account, and which 
were attended with so little good effect, the 
Cortes were occupied with innumerable pro- 
jects of reform in legislation, administration. 
and police, so numerous, that it is impossible 
to give any account of them. Devoured with 
the passion for destruction, and but little so- 
licitous about restoring with prudence, the 



284 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



ardent friends of reform did not allow a single 
day to pass without denouncing some abuse, 
declaiming against some remnants of despo- 
tism and arbitrary power. Projects of laws 
succeeded each other without interruption ; 
and as every one of these projects was held to 
be an incontcstible and urgent necessity, and to 
hesitate as to it would have been apparently to 
call in question the principles of the Revolu- 
tion, and evince a certain mark of aversion 
for the supremacy of the people, not one of 
them was either adjourned or rejected. Innu- 
merable commissions were established to ex- 
amine the projects of innovation; reports 
made; laws discussed and voted; and the old 
legislation of the kingdom daily crumbled into 
dust, without a single individual in the country 
having either the time to read, or an opportu- 
nity to consider the innumerable institutions 
which were daily substituted, instead of those 
which had formerly existed." — I. 235. 

All these projects of reform, however, and 
all this vast confiscation of property, both 
ecclesiastical and civil, could not supply the 
continually increasing deficit of the treasury. 
Another, and still greater revolutionary con- 
fiscation awaited the state, and to this, invin- 
cible necessity speedily led. 

" From the commencement of the next ses- 
sion of the Cortes, measures had been taken to 
facilitate the secularization of the religious 
orders of both sexes ; and many of them had 
already left their retreats, and rejoined their 
friends in the world. 

"At length matters came to a crisis. On 
the proposition of Colonel Sancho, a law was 
passed, which confiscated the whole property of the 
regular clergy to the service of the state. This law, 
adopted by the Cortes, was submitted to the 
royal sanction. The king evinced the utmost 
repugnance to a measure so directly subversive 
of all the religious opinions in which he had 
been educated. Terrified at this resistance, 
with which they had not laid their account, the 
revolutionary party had recourse to one of 
those methods which nothing can either au- 
thorize or justify, and for which success can 
offer no excuse. 

" Convinced that they could obtain only by 
terror what was refused to solicitation, they 
took the resolution to excite a popular sedition, 
organize a revolt, and excite a tumult to over- 
come the firmness of the king. For this pur- 
pose, they entered into communication with the 
runners of the revolutionary party, took into 
their confidence the leading orators of the 
clubs, and concerted measures in particular 
with the banker, Bertrand du Lys, who had 
always at his command a band of adventurers, 
ready to go wherever disorder was to be com- 
mitted. 

"The signal was given. The mobs assem- 
bled : Bands of vociferating wretches traversed 
the public streets, uttering frightful cries, and 
directing their steps to the arsenal. A slight 
demonstration of resistance was made ; but the 
report was speedily spread that the troops 
were unable to make head against the contin- 
ually increasing mass of the insurgents, and 
that the life of the king was seriously menaced. 
The ministers presented themselves in that cri- 



tical moment; they renewed their instances, 
spoke of the public peace, order, and the life of 
the king, for which they declared they could not 
answer, if the public demands were refused; 
and finally drew from him a reluctant consent 
to the measure of spoliation. 

"This success, so dearly bought, was by no 
means attended with the good effects which had 
been anticipated from it. The people would 
have seen, without dissatisfaction, a share of 
the public burdens borne by the ecclesiastical 
body ; but a total abolition, an entire extinction 
of their property, appeared to them a cruel 
persecution, a work of heresy and impiety, the 
horror of which reacted on all the measures 
which had the same origin. 

"The revolutionary party might have borne 
all the unpopularity which that exorbitant 
measure occasioned, if it had been attended 
with the immense consequences Avhich had 
been anticipated in relieving the finances ; but 
in that particular also, all their hopes proved 
fallacious. The property of the clergy, when 
exposed to sale, found few purchasers. The 
known opposition of the Holy See, the exas- 
peration of the people, the dread of a revolu- 
tion : all these circumstances rendered the 
measure perfectly abortive, and caused it to 
add nothing to the resources of the treasury." — 
I. 247—249. 

This is the usual progress of revolutionary 
movements. Terror! terror ! terror! That is 
the engine which they unceasingly put in force : 
Insurrections, mobs, tumults, the means of 
obtaining their demands, which they never fail 
to adopt. Demonstrations of physical strength, 
public meetings, processions, and all the other 
methods of displaying their numbers, are no- 
thing but the means of showing the opponents 
of their measures the fate which awaits them, 
if they protract their resistance be} r ond a cer- 
tain point. Force is their continual argument; 
the logic of brickbats and stones; the perspec- 
tive of scaffolds and guillotines, their never- 
failing resource. Confiscation of the property 
of others, the expedients to which they always 
have recourse to supply the chasms which the 
disorganization of society and the dread of 
spoliation have occasioned in the public 
revenue. 

The usual leprosy of revolutionary convul- 
sions, Jacobin societies, and democratic clubs, 
were not long of manifesting themselves in 
this unhappy country. 

" On all sides, secret societies were formed, 
whose statutes and oaths evinced but too 
clearly the objects which they had in view. 
Besides the freemasons, who had long been 
established, a club was formed which took the 
title of Confederation of Common Chevaliers, 
and declared themselves the champions of the 
perfect equality of the human race, and eman- 
cipated themselves in the very outset from all 
the restraints of philanthropy and moderation. 
To judge, to condemn, and to execute every in- 
dividual whatsoever, without excepting the 
king and his successors, if they abused their 
authority, was one of the engagements, a part 
of the oath which they took on entering into 
the society." 

"On the side of these secret societies clubs 



THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820. 



rapidly arose, which soon became powerful 
and active auxiliaries of anarchy, wherever it 
appeared. The most tumultuous and danger- 
ous of these was the Coffee-house of the Cross 
of Malta. There, and for long, the king was 
daily exposed to insult and derision, without his 
ministers ever taking the smallest step to put an end 
to a scene of scandal, with which all loyal sub- 
jects in the realm were horrorstruck. They 
hoped by thus abandoning the royal prey to 
his pursuers, to escape themselves from the 
fury of party; but their expectations were 
cruelly deceived. Public indignation speedily 
assailed them; the bitterest reproaches were 
daily addressed to them. All their disgraceful 
transactions, all the revolts they had prepared 
to overawe the sovereign, were recounted and 
exaggerated. The transports of indignation 
were so violent, that soon they were compelled 
to close this club, to save themselves from in- 
stant destruction." — I. 261, 262. 

The Spanish Revolution was fast hastening 
to that deplorable result, a Reign of Terror, the 
natural consequence of democratic ascendency, 
when its course was cut short by the French 
invasion, under the Duke d'Angouleme. The 
details on this subject are perfectly new, and 
in the highest degree instructive to the British 
public. 

" For long the revolutionary party had borne 
with manifest repugnance the system of mo- 
deration which the government had adopted, 
and the majority of the Cortes had supported, 
during the last session. That party proceeded 
on the principle, that terror alone could over- 
awe the enemies of the Revolution, and that 
nothing was to be gained with them by mo- 
deration in language or indulgence in action. 
It saw no chance of safety, but in a system of 
terror powerfully organized. The catastrophe 
of Naples, the submission of Piedmont, the re- 
pression of the insurrection attempted in 
France, furnished them with a favourable op- 
portunity to renew their efforts ; and from the 
reception which it then met with, it was evi- 
dent that the taste for blood was beginning to 
manifest itself among the people. 

"While things were taking this direction at 
Madrid, and the people were awaiting with a 
sombre disquietude the measures which were 
in preparation, the Reign of Terror and Vio- 
lence had already commenced in the provinces, 
by the effects of the supreme popular will, and 
the progress of anarchy in every part of the 
kingdom. 

"Individuals of every age and sex were 
arrested and imprisoned, without the warrant 
of any of the constituted authorities, by men 
without a public character, on the mere orders 
of the chiefs of the revolutionary party, who 
thus usurped the most important functions of 
government. They threw the individuals thus 
collected together "into the first vessels which 
were at hand, or could be found in any of the 
ports of the kingdom, and transported them, some 
to the Balearic, others to the Canary Islands, 
according to the caprice of the revolutionary 
rulers. 

" This is perhaps the event of all others in 
the history of modern revolutions, so fertile in 
crimes, which excites, if not the greatest hor- 



ror, at least the greatest surprise : nothing can 
give a better idea of the true spirit of anarchy. 
Nothing was here done in disorder, or in one 
of those moments when the exaltation or de- 
lirium of the moment has become impossible 
to repress. It was calmly, with reflection, at 
leisure, and with the aid of numbers, who were 
ignorant of the spirit which ruled the move- 
ment, that they imprisoned, led forth from 
prison, thrust on board vessels, and despatched 
for a distant destination, a multitude of citi- 
zens, proprietors, fathers of families, whom no 
law had condemned, no trial proved guilty; 
and all this by the means, and under the orders 
of a body of men who had no pretensions to 
any legal authority. 

" These acts were committed in open day, 
at the same time at Barcelona, at Valencia, at 
Corunna, and Carthagena. This was anarchy 
in unbridled sovereignty ; and let us see what 
the legal authorities did to punish a series of 
acts so fatal to their iniluence, and of such 
ruinous example in a country already devour- 
ed by revolutionary passions. 

"The government was informed of all that 
passed; the facts were public and incontest- 
able ; they were acted in the face of day, in 
the face of the entire population of cities. No 
prosecution was directed against the crimi- 
nals; no punishment was pronounced ; no 
example was given. A few inferior function- 
aries, who had aided in the atrocious acts, 
were deprived of their situations, and orders 
secretly despatched for the clandestine recall 
of the exiles. Such was the sole reparation 
made for an injury which shook the social 
edifice to its foundation, and trampled under 
foot all the rights and liberties of the citizens." 
—I. 287—290. 

The famous massacres in the prison on 
September 2, 1792, did not fail to find their 
imitators among the Spanish revolutionists. 
The following anecdote shows how precisely 
similar the democratic spirit is in its tendency 
and effects in all ages and parts of the world. 

" A priest, a chaplain of the king, Don Ma- 
thias Vinuesa, was accused of having formed 
the plan of a counter-revolution. This absurd 
design, which he had had the imprudence to 
publish, was easily discovered, and Vinuesa 
was arrested and brought to trial. The law 
punished every attempt of this description 
which had not yet been put into execution, 
with the galleys, and Vinuesa was, in virtue 
of this statute, condemned to ten years of hard 
labour in those dreary abodes. This sentence, 
of a kind to satisfy the most ardent passions, 
was the highest which the law would author- 
ize ; but it was very far indeed from coming 
up to the wishes of the revolutionary clubs. 

"On the 4th May, two days after the con- 
demnation of the prisoner, a crowded meeting 
took place at the gate of the Sun, in open day, 
when a mock trial took place, and the priest 
was by the club legislators condemned to 
death. It was agreed that the judges should 
themselves execute the sentence, and that 
measure was resolved on amidst loud accla- 
mations. Having resolved on this, they quiet- 
ly took their siesta, and at the appointed hour 
proceeded to carry it into execution, withou' 



286 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



the legal authorities taking the slightest step 
to prevent the outrage. 

"At four o'clock the mob reassembled, and 
proceeded straight to the prison doors. No 
one opposed their tumultuous array ; they pre- 
sented themselves at the gate, and announced 
their mission. Ten soldiers, who formed the 
ordinary guard of the prison, made, for a few 
minutes, a shadow of resistance, which gave 
no sort of trouble to the assailants. The bar- 
riers were speedily broken; the conquerors 
inundated the prison ; with hurried steps they 
sought the cell where the condemned priest 
was confined, and instantly broke open the 
door. The priest appeared with a crucifix in 
his hand ; he fell at their feet, and in the name 
of the God of mercy, whose image he present- 
ed, besought them to spare his life. Vain at- 
tempt !— to breasts which acknowledged no 
religion, felt no pity, what availed the image 
of God who died to save us. One of the judges 
of the gate of the Sun advanced. He was 
armed with a large hammer, and struck a 
severe blow at the head bowed at his feet. 
The victim fell, and a thousand strokes soon 
completed the work of death. Blood has 
flowed, the victim is no more. 

" But the head which that hammer had slain, 
could not suffice for the murderers. Besides 
the criminal there remained the judge. He 
also was condemned to die, for having only 
applied the existing law, and not foreseen the 
judgment which the tribunal of the Sun was 
to pass on the criminal. The assassins made 
straight to his house, amidst cries of 'Death 
to the traitors, Long live the constitution!' 
They traversed the town, and arrived at the 
house of the judge; five men with drawn 
swords entered the house, after placing senti- 
nels around it, to prevent the possibility of 
escape. But Heaven did not permit that new 
murder to be committed. The judge, informed 
of what was going forward, had fled, in the 
interval between the first judgment and execu- 
tion, and the murderers, after covering him 
with execrations, dispersed themselves through 
the town to recount their exploits, and dwell 
with exultation on the commencement of the 
reign of terror. 

"In the evening, the clubs resounded with 
acclamations, and the expressions of the most 
intoxicating joy; and popular songs were 
composed and published, celebrating the first 
triumph of popular justice. No one ventured 
to hint at punishing the criminals. A few in- 
sulated individuals ventured to condemn them ; 
a thousand voices rose to applaud and defend 
them. The press joined its powerful efforts 
to celebrate that memorable day; and, in fine, 
to commemorate the public exultation, a sort 
of monument was erected to perpetuate its re- 
collection. Vinuesa had fallen under the blows 
of a hammer; his murderers, and their pro- 
tectors, created a decoration, and instituted a 
sort of order, called the order of the hammer. 
The ensigns of this new honour were speedily 
fabricated ; they consisted in a little hammer 
of iron, made in imitation of that which had 
struck the fatal blow. The new chevaliers 
proudly decorated their bosoms with the in- 
signia. It bore an inscription, which, when 



divested of revolutionary jargon, amounted to 
this : ' On the 4th May, 1821, four or five hun- 
dred men murdered in prison an old priest, 
who implored their pity. Behold and honour 
one of the assassins.' " — I. 297 — 299. 

The gradual decline of the moderate party 
under the increasing fervour of the times, and 
their final extinction in the Cortes, under the 
incessant attacks, and irresistible majorities 

of the revolutionists, is thus narrated: 

"In the second session, it was no longer 
possible to recognize the Cortes of the first. 
They were the same individuals, but not the 
same legislators, or the same citizens. Worn 
out by a continual struggle with men whom 
nothing could either arrest or discourage; dis- 
gusted with discussions, in which they were 
always interrupted by the hisses or groans of 
the galleries ; irritated by the attempts at civil 
war which were daily renewed in the pro- 
vinces; heated by the burning political at- 
mosphere in which they found themselves 
immovably enclosed; the moderate deputies, 
who, in the preceding year, had formed the 
majority of the Cortes to combat the forces of 
anarchy, gave up the contest, and yielded without 
opposition to whatever was demanded of them. 

"The most dangerous enemies of the public 
peace, beyond all question, were the Patriotic 
Societies. There it was that all heads were 
exalted — that all princip'es were lost amidst 
the extravagancies of a furious democracy — 
that all sinister projects were formed, and all 
criminal designs entertained. A wise law, the 
work of the first Cortes, had armed govern- 
ment with the power to close these turbulent 
assemblies, when they threatened the public 
tranquillity. But this feeble barrier could not 
long resist the increasing vehemence of the 
revolutionists. A law was proposed, and 
speedily passed, which divested government 
of all control over these popular societies. It 
placed these agglomerations of fire beyond the 
reach of the police — forbid the magistrates to 
be present at their debates— substituted inter- 
nal regulations for external control— and, in- 
stead of any real check, recognised only the 
'elusory responsibility of the presidents.' 

"Never, perhaps, did human folly to such a 
degree favour the spirit of disorder, or so 
weakly deliver over society to the passions 
which devoured it. Hardly was the law 
passed, when numbers who had been carried 
away by the public outer}', were terrified at 
the work of their own hands, and looked back 
with horror on the path on which they hnd ad- 
vanced, and the vantage ground which they 
had for ever abandoned." — I. 302, 303. 

"The clubs were not slow in taking advan- 
tage of the uncontrolled power thus conceded 
to them. The most violent of their organs, 
which was at once the most dangerous 3 and 
the most influential, because he incessantly 
espoused the cause of spoliation, Romero Al- 
fuente, published a pamphlet full of the most 
furious ebullitions of revolutionary zeal, in 
which he divulged a pretended conspiracy 
against the constitutional system, whose rami- 
fications, diverging from Madrid, extended into 
the remotest provinces and foreign states. 
The plans, the resources, the names, of the 



THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820. 



287 



conspirators, were given with affected accu- 
racy; nothing was omitted which could give 
to the discovery the air of truth. The electric 
spark is not more rapid in communicating its 
shock, than was that infamous libel. Never 
had the tribune of the Club of the Golden 
Fountain resounded with such menacing and 
sanguinary acclamations. They went even so 
far as to say that the political atmosphere could not 
be purified but by the blood of fourteen or fifteen 
thousand inhabitants of Madrid" — I. 351, 352. 

"In the midst of these ebullitions of revolu- 
tionary fury, the provinces were subjected to 
the most cruel excesses of anarchy. At Cadiz, 
Seville, and Murcia, the people broke out into 
open revolt ; the authorities imposed by the 
Cortes were all overthrown, and the leaders of 
the insurrection installed in their stead. All 
the vigour and reputation of Mina could not 
prevent the same catastrophe at Corunna. He 
resigned his command, and Latre, the insurrec- 
tionary leader, stepped into his place. Every- 
where the authority of government, and of the 
Central Cortes, was disregarded ; the most vio- 
lent revolutionists got the ascendant, and so- 
ciety was fast descending towards a stale of 
utter dissolution. 

"All these disorders, all these excesses, found in the 
capital numerous and ardent defenders. The press, 
in particular, everywhere applauded and encou- 
raged the anarchists; it incessantly exalted the 
demagogues, for whom it proudly accepted the 
title of Descamisados, (shirtless,) and for whose 
excesses it found ample precedents among our 
Sans Culottes. It condemned to contempt, or 
marked out for proscription, all the wise men 
who yet strove to uphold the remnants of the 
Spanish monarchy. Occupied without inter- 
mission in detracting from all the attributes of 
the monarchical power; in dragging in the gut- 
ter the robe of royalty, in order to hold it up to 
the people covered with mire; it invented for 
all the monarchs of Europe the most calum- 
nious epithets and ridiculous comparisons, and 
offered to the factious of every state in Europe, 
whatever their designs were, the succours of 
their devouring influence." — I. 357, 358. 

" Three evils, in an especial manner, spread 
the seeds of dissolution over this agitated 
country, and spread their ramifications with 
the most frightful rapidity. These were the 
press, with its inexpressible violence, and its 
complete impunity; the petitions which ren- 
dered the tribune of the Cortes the centre of 
denunciations, the focus of calumny, and the 
arena where all the furious passions contended 
with each other; in fine, the licentiousness of 
the patriotic societies, where the public peace 
was every day, or rather every night, delivered 
up to the fury of an unbridled democracy. The 
Cortes were perfectly aware of these causes of 
anarchy; they had openly denounced them, 
and declared their intention of applying a 
prompt remedy. Still nothing was done, and 
the Assembly was dissolved without having 
done any thing to close so many fountains of 
anarchy." — I. 377. 

One would imagine that the accumulation of 
so many evils would have produced a reaction 
in the public mind; that the universal anxiety, 
distress, and suffering, would have opened the 



eyes of the people to their real interests, and 
the pernicious tendency of the course into 
which they had been precipitated by their de- 
magogues; and that the new elections would 
have produced a majority in favour of the pru- 
dent and restraining measures, from which 
alone public safety could be expected. The 
case, however, was just the reverse : the revo- 
lutionary party, by violence and intimidation, 
almost everywhere gained the ascendency ; 
and the fatal truth soon became apparent, that 
democratic ambition 'is insatiable ; that it is 
blind to all the lessons of experience, and deaf 
to all the cries of suffering; that like a mad- 
dened horse, it rushes headlong down the pre- 
cipice, and never halts in its furious career 
till it has involved itself and public freedom in 
one common ruin. 

" The new Cortes commenced its labours 
under the most sinister auspices ; the circum- 
stances under which the elections had taken 
place were sufficient to justify the most serious 
apprehensions. 

"The elections in the south had taken place 
under the immediate influence and actual pre- 
sence of open rebellion. At Grenada, the peo- 
ple by force intruded into the electoral college, 
and openly overwhelmed the election ; in all 
the provinces of the north, the proprietors had 
absented themselves from the elections, from 
hatred at the Revolution, and a sense of inabil- 
ity to restrain its excesses. At Madrid, even, 
all the partisans of the old regime had been 
constrained to abstain from taking any part in 
the vote, notwithstanding the undoubted right 
which the amnesty gave them. In many 
places, actual violence ; in all, menaces were 
employed, with too powerful effect, to keep 
from the poll all persons suspected of modera- 
tion in their principles. 

" In the whole new Cortes not one great pro- 
prietor nor one bishop was to be found. The 
whole body of the noblesse was represented 
only by two or three titled but unknown men ; 
the clergy by a few curates and canons, well 
known for the lightness with which the re- 
straints of faith sat upon them. Only one 
grandee of Spain was to be found there, the 
Duke del Parque, who had abandoned the pa- 
lace of the Escurial for the Club of the Foun- 
tain of Gold; and had left the halls of his king 
to become the flatterer of the people. 

" Among the new deputies great numbers 
were to be found who had signalized them- 
selves by the violence of their opinions, and 
the spirit of vengeance against all moderate 
men, by which they were animated. The first 
measure of the Cortes was to elect Riego for 
president, a nomination Avhich confirmed the 
hopes of the anarchist party, and excited every- 
where the most extravagant joy among the par- 
tisans of the Revolution." — I. 383, 384. 

As the other insanities and atrocities of the 
French Revolution had found their admirers 
and imitators in Spain, so the overthrow of the 
constitutional throne of Louis XVI., on the 10th 
August, 1792, was followed by too close a pa- 
rallel in the Spanish monarchy. 

The public distress, and the violence of the 
revolutionary faction in every part of the king- 
dom, at length produced a reaction. Civil 



288 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



war commenced in Aragon, Catalonia, and An- 
dalusia, and Spanish blood soon dyed every 
part of the Peninsula. The crisis which this 
induced at Madrid, which finally laid the 
throne prostrate at the feet of the Revolution- 
ists, is thus described : 

" The session was about to finish, the clos- 
ing was fixed for the 30th June, 1822. Great 
fermentation reigned at Madrid, and every one, 
without being able to account for it, was aware 
that a crisis was approaching. 

" The king seated himself in his carriage, af- 
ter closing the session. Cries of ' Long live 
the constitutional king,' were heard on all 
sides, mingled, in feebler notes, with the cry of 
' Long live the absolute king.' The guards re- 
pulsed with violence those who raised inflam- 
matory or seditious cries, and blood already 
began to flow. The tumult redoubled at the 
moment that the king descended from his car- 
riage. The guard wished to disperse it; they 
experienced resistance, and had recourse to 
their arms. The exasperation was extreme 
among the soldiers ; one of their officers, 
named Landaburo, desirous of restraining 
them, was insulted by his own men. He drew 
his sabre, but speedily fell, shot dead by a mus- 
ket from the ranks. 

"Landaburo was the son of a merchant at 
Cadiz, and well known for his liberal opinions. 
His death became instantly a party affair, and 
excited to the last degree the fury of all those 
who professed the same principles. The mi- 
litia were soon under arms ; the troops of the 
garrison and the artillery united themselves to 
their colours ; the' whole officers and non- 
commissioned officers, who were at Madrid 
detached from their regiments, joined their 
ranks. The artillery put their pieces in posi- 
tion; the municipal body declared its sittings 
permanent; and every thing announced the 
speedy approach of hostilities between the 
court and the people. 

"Had they possessed an able chief and a de- 
termined wilf, the guards might have made 
themselves masters of Madrid. They were 
more numerous, better armed, more inured to 
war, than the constitutional bands which com- 
posed the garrison. They occupied the bar- 
riers and principal posts. Nothing was easier 
for them than to have made themselves mas- 
ters of the park of artillery, and the possession 
of the park would have rendered all resistance 
impossible. Nothing, however, was attempt- 
ed — nothing was thought of. 

" Of the six battalions of which it was com- 
posed, two remained to protect the king ; the 
four others, afraid of being shut up in their 
barracks, clandestinely left the town during 
the obscurity of the night; but this movement 
was executed with such confusion, that the 
first battalion, when they arrived at the ren- 
dezvous, opened a fire upon the others which 
were approaching. 

" On the other side, the constitutionalists of 
all descriptions united to resist the common 
enemy. The militia night and day blockaded 
the palace ; the regular soldiers soon obtained 
a formidable auxiliary; this was a band com- 
posed of men without name, without charac- 
ter; adventurers and enthusiasts, who were 



organized under the name of the Sacred Band. 
Many generals presented themselves, also 
offering their services and their swords ; 
among this number were Ballasteros and 
Riego. 

"Negotiations and indecision continued for 
six days, during which the two parties re- 
mained constantly encamped, notwithstanding 
the tropical sun of the dogdays, venting re- 
proaches at each other sabre in hand, the 
torches lighted awaiting only the signal of the 
combat. At intervals single muskets were 
discharged, which sounded like the distant 
peals of thunder, which announced the ap- 
proach of a frightful tempest. 

"At length the attack commenced. The 
divisions of the guard at a distance from Mad- 
rid, marched upon the capital, but they were 
met and defeated at all points by the constitu- 
tional forces, and the fugitives in great num- 
bers fled for refuge to the palace. The militia 
were everywhere victorious ; triumphant and 
victorious, they surrounded the royal abode, 
while Te Dcnm was celebrated on the Place of 
the Constitution, and the walls of the palace 
resounded with menaces against the king. A 
capitulation was proposed ; but nothing but 
an unconditional surrender would satisfy the 
conquerors. Two battalions agreed to it ; the 
others, conceiving that a snare was laid for 
them, fired a volley upon the militia, aban- 
doned the palace, and rushed out of the city, 
where they were soon cut to pieces by the 
popular dragoons and the incessant discharge 
of grape-shot. This victory was decisive ; 
the violent party now reigned in uncontrolled 
supremacy, and nothing remained to oppose 
even the shadow of resistance to their domi- 
nation." — I. 420 — 424. 

Such was the state of the Revolution, and 
the prostration of the throne, when the inva- 
sion of the Duke d'Angouleme dissipated the 
fumes of the Revolutionists, and re-established 
the absolute throne. 

Several reflections arise upon the events, of 
which a sketch has been here given. 

In the first place, they show how precisely 
similar the march of revolution is in all ages 
and countries ; and how little national charac- 
ter is to be relied on to arrest or prevent its 
fatal progress. The horrors of the French 
Revolution, it Avas said, were owing to their 
volatile and unstable character, and the pecu- 
liar combination of events which preceded its 
breaking out. The Spanish Revolution, not- 
withstanding their grave and thoughtful na- 
tional character, and a totally different chain 
of previous events, exhibited, till it was cut 
short by French bayonets, exactly the same 
features and progress. Recent experience 
leaves it but too doubtful, whether, in the 
sober and calculating realm of England, simi- 
lar passions are not in the end destined to pro- 
duce similar effects. 

In the next place, the historical facts now 
brought forward demonstrate how enormous 
is the delusion which the revolutionary party, 
by means of a false and deceitful press, spread 
over the world in regard to all the transactions 
in which their projects are concerned. We 
put it to the candour of every one of our read- 



PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS. 



289 



ers, whether the facts now detailed do not put 
in an entirely different point of view from any 
in which they had yet considered it, the Spa- 
nish Revolution? Certainly these facts were 
utterly unknown to us, not the least vigilant 
observers of continental transactions, and the 
march of revolution in the adjoining states. 
The truth is, »hat what Jefferson long ago said 
of the American, has become true of the Euro- 
pean press; events are so utterly distorted, 
falsehoods are so unblushingly put forth, hos- 
tile facts are so sedulously suppressed, that it 
is utterly impossible from the public journals 
to gather the least idea of what they really are, 
if they have the slightest connection with re- 
volutionary ambition. Till the false light of 
newspapers has ceased, and the steady light 
of history begins, no reliance whatever can 
be placed on the public accounts, even of the 
most notorious transactions. 

Lastly, we now see how inconceivably the 
British people were deceived in regard to these 
transactions, and how narrowly we escaped at 
that juncture being plunged into a war, to up- 
hold what is now proved to have been, not the 
cause of freedom and independence, but of 
anarchy, democracy, and revolution. We all re- 
collect the vigorous efforts which the Move- 
ment party in this country made to engage us 
in a war with France, in support of the Spa- 



nish Revolution ; the speech of Mr. Brougham, 
on the opening of the session of Parliament 
in February, 1823, still resounds in our ears. 
We were told, and we believed, that the Spa- 
nish constitution conferred upon the people of 
the Peninsula moderated freedom; that the 
cause of liberty was at stake : and that unless 
we interfered, it would be trampled down un- 
der the bayonets' of the Holy Alliance. And 
what is the fact as now proved by historical 
documents 1 Why, that it was the cause of 
Pure Democracy which we were thus called on 
to support; of universal suffrage, Jacobin 
clubs, and a furious press ; of revolutionary 
confiscation, democratic anarchy, and unbri- 
dled injustice ; of the most desolating of tyran- 
nies, the most ruinous of despotisms. Such 
is the darkness, the thick and impenetrable 
darkness, in which we are kept in regard to 
passing events by the revolutionary press of 
Europe; and when historic truth comes to 
illuminate the transactions of our times, the 
Revolution of July, the Belgian Insurrection, 
it will be found that we have been equally de- 
ceived; and that, by the use of heart-stirring 
recollections, and heart-rending fabrications, 
we have been stimulated to engage in war, to 
support a similar system of revolutionary cu- 
pidity and democratic ambition. 



PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE 
NETHERLANDS.* 



It is related by Bourrienne, that it was dur- 
ing the visit of Napoleon to the shores of the 
ocean, by order of the Directory, in February, 
1798, to prepare for the invasion of England, 
that he first was struck with the vast import- 
ance of Antwerp as a naval station to effect 
that preat object of Gallic ambition. The im- 
pression then made was never afterwards 
effaced ; his eagle eye at once discerned, that 
it was from that point, that the army destined 
to conquer England was to sail. Its secure 
and protected situation, guarded alike by pow- 
erful fortresses and an intricate and dangerous 
inland navigation ; its position at the mouth 
of the Scheldt, the great artery of the Flemish 
provinces of the empire; its proximity on the 
one hand to the military resources of France, 
and on the other to the naval arsenals of the 
United Provinces ; its near neighbourhood to 
the Thames and the Medway, the centre of the 
power of England, and the most vulnerable 
point of its empire, all pointed it out as the 
great central depot where the armament for 
the subjugation of this country was to be as- 
sembled, as the advanced work of French 
ambition against English independence. No 
sooner had he seized the reins of power than 
he turned his attention to the strengthening 

* Blackwood's Magazine, Dec. 1832. Written at the 
time when the French army, aided by the English fleet, 
were besieging Antwerp 

37 



of this important station : all the resources of 
art, all the wealth of the imperial treasury, 
were lavished upon its fortification ; ramparts 
after ramparts, bastion after bastion, surround- 
ed its ample harbour; docks capable of hold- 
ing the whole navy of France were excavated, 
and the greatest fleet which ever menaced 
England assembled within its walls. Before 
the fall of his power, thirty-five ships of the 
line were safely moored under its cannon ; he 
held to it with tenacious grasp under all the 
vicissitudes of his fortune, and when the Allies 
approached its walls, he sent the ablest and 
firmest of the republicans, Carnot, to prolong 
even to the last extremity its means of defence. 
" If the allies were encamped," said he in the 
Legislative Body, on the 31st March, 1813, 
"on the heights of Montmartre, I would not 
surrender one village in the thirty-second 
military division." Though hard pressed in 
the centre of his dominions, he still clung to 
this important bulwark. When the Old 
Guard was maintaining a desperate struggle 
in the plains of Champagne, he drafted not a 
man from the fortifications of the Scheldt; and 
when the conqueror was struck to the earth, 
his right hand still held the citadel of Ant- 
werp. 

In all former times, and centuries before the 
labour of Napoleon had added so immensely 
to its importance, the Scheldt had been the 
2B 



290 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



centre of the most important preparations for 
the invasion of England, and the spot on 
which military genius always fixed from 
whence to prepare a descent on this island. 
An immense expedition, rendered futile by the 
weakness and vacillation of the French mo- 
narch, was assembled in it in the fourteenth 
century; and sixty thousand men on the shore 
of the Scheldt awaited only the signal of 
Charles VI.* to set sail for the shore of Kent. 
The greatest naval victory ever gained by the 
English arms was that at Sluys, in 1340, when 
Philip of France lost thirty thousand men and 
two hundred and thirty ships of war, in an en- 
gagement off the Flemish coast with Edward 
111.,-J- a triumph greater, though less noticed in 
history, than either that of Cressy or Poictiers. 
When the great Duke of Parma was commis- 
sioned by Philip II. of Spain to take steps for 
the invasion of England, he assembled the 
forces of the Low Countries at Antwerp ; and 
the Spanish armada, had it proved successful, 
was to have wafted over that great commander 
from the banks of the Scheldt to the opposite 
shore of Essex, at the head of the veterans 
who had been trained in the Dutch war. In 
an evil hour, Charles II., bought by French 
gold and seduced by French mistresses, enter- 
ed into alliance with Louis XIV. for the co- 
ercion of Holland; the Lilies and the Leopards, 
the navies of France and England, assembled 
together at Spithead, and made sail for the 
French coast, while the armies of the Grande 
Monarque advanced across the Rhine into the 
heart of the United Provinces. The conse- 
quence was, such a prodigious addition to the 
power of France, as it took all the blood and 
treasure expended in the war of the Succession 
and all the victories of Marlborough, to reduce 
to a scale at all commensurate with the inde- 
pendence of the other European states. Mr. 
Pitt, how adverse soever to engage in a war 
with republican France, was driven to it by 
the advance of the tricolour standard to the 
Scheldt, and the evident danger which threat- 
ened English independence from the posses- 
sion of its fortresses by the French armies; 
and the event soon proved the wisdom of his 
foresight. The surrender of the Low Coun- 
tries, arising from the insane demolition of its 
fortresses by the Emperor Joseph, soon brought 
the French armies to Amsterdam ; twenty 
years of bloody and destructive war; the 
slaughter of millions, and the contraction of 
eight hundred millions of debt by this country, 
followed the victorious march of the French 
armies to the banks of the Scheldt ; while 
seventeen years of unbroken rest, a glorious 
peace, and the establishment of the liberties 
of Europe upon a firm basis, immediatel)' suc- 
ceeded their expulsion from them by the arms 
of Wellington. 

Before these sheets issue from the press, an 
English and French fleet will have sailed from 
the British shores to co-operate with a French 
army in restoring Antwerp to France. 
The tricolour flag has floated alongside of the 
British pendant ; the shores of Spithead, which 



* PSsmondi, Hist, de France, xi. 387. 
+ Hume, ii. 230. 



never saw a French fleet but as prizes, have 
witnessed the infamous coalition, and the un- 
conquered citadels of England thundered with 
salutes to the enemies who fled before them 
at Trafalgar! Antwerp, with its dockyards 
and its arsenals; Antwerp, with its citadel 
and its fortifications ; Antwerp, the outpost and 
stronghold of France against • English inde- 
pendence, is to be purchased by British blood 
for French ambition ! Holland, the old and 
faithful ally of England ; Holland, which has 
stood by us in good and evil fortune for one 
hundred and fifty years ; Holland, the bulwark 
of Europe, in every age, against Gallic ag- 
gression, is to be partitioned, and sacrificed in 
order to plant the standards of a revolutionary 
power on the shores of the Scheldt ! Deeply 
has England already drunk, deeper still is she 
destined to drink of the cup of national hu- 
miliation, for the madness of the last two 
years. 

Disgraceful as these proceedings are to the 
national honour and integrity of England; 
far as they have lowered its ancient flag be- 
neath the degradation it ever reached in the 
darkest days of national disaster, their impolicy 
is, if possible, still more conspicuous. Flan- 
ders, originally the instructor, has in every age 
been the rival of England in manufactures; 
Holland, being entirely a commercial state, 
and depending for its existence upon the car- 
rying trade, has in every age been her friend. 
The interest of these different states has led to 
this opposite policy, and must continue to do 
so, until a total revolution in the channels of 
commerce takes place. Flanders, abounding 
with coal, with capital, with great cities, and 
a numerous and skilful body of artisans, has 
from the earliest dawn of European history, 
been conspicuous for her manufactures ; Hoi- 
land, without any advantages for the fabricat- 
ing of articles, but immense for their trans- 
port, has, from the establishment of Dutch 
independence, been the great carrier of Eu- 
rope. She feels no jealousy of English ma- 
nufactures, because she has none to compete 
with them ; she feels the greatest disposition 
to receive the English goods, because all 
those which are sent to her add to the riches 
of the United Provinces. Belgium, on the 
other hand, is governed by a body of manu- 
facturers, who are imbued with a full propor- 
tion of that jealousy of foreign competition 
which is so characteristic in all countries of 
that profession. Hence, the Flemish ports 
have always been as rigorously closed as the 
Dutch were liberally opened to British manu- 
factures ; and at this moment, not only are the 
duties on the importation of British goods 
greatly higher in Flanders than they are in 
Holland, but the recent policy of the former 
country has been as much to increase as that 
of the other has been to lower its import bur- 
dens. Since the Belgian revolution, the duties 
on all the staple commodities of England, coal, 
woollens, and cotton cloths, have been lowered 
by the Dutch government ; but the fervour of 
their revolutionary gratitude has led to no such 
measure on the part of the Belgians. 

This difference in the policy of the two 
states being founded on their habits, interests 



PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS. 



291 



and physical situation, must continue perma- 
nently to distinguish them. Dynasties may 
rise or fall: but as long as Flanders, with its 
great coal mines and iron founderies, is the 
rival of England in those departments of in- 
dustry in which she most excels, it is in vain 
to expect that any cordial reception of British 
manufactures is to take place within her pro- 
vinces. The iron forgers of Liege, the wool- 
len manufacturers or cotton operatives of 
Ghent or Bruges, will never consent to the free 
importation of the cutlery of Birmingham, the 
woollen cloths of Yorkshire, the muslins of 
Glasgow, or the cotton goods of Manchester. 
But no such jealousy is, or ever will be, felt 
by the merchants of Amsterdam, the carriers 
of Rotterdam, or the shipmasters of Flushing. 
Flanders always has been, and always will 
desire to be, incorporated with France, in or- 
der that her manufactures may feel the Vivify- 
ing influence of the great home market of that 
populous country; Holland always has been, 
and always will desire to be, in alliance with 
England, in order that her commerce may ex- 
perience the benefit of a close connection 
with the great centre of the foreign trade of 
the world. 

Every one practically acquainted with these 
matters, knows that Holland is at this moment 
almost the only inlet which continental jea- 
lousy will admit for British manufactures to 
the continent of Europe. The merchants of 
London know whether they can obtain a ready 
vent for their manufactures in the ports of 
France or the harbours of Flanders. The ex- 
port trade to France is inconsiderable; that to 
Flanders trifling; but that to Holland is im- 
mense. It takes off 2,000,000/. worth of out- 
exports, and employs 350,000 tons of shipping, 
about a seventh of the whole shipping of Great 
Britain. Were it not for the facilities to Bri- 
tish importation, afforded by the commercial 
interests of the Dutch, our manufactures would 
be well nigh excluded from the continent of 
Europe. The Scheldt, when guarded by 
French batteries, and studded with republican 
sails, may become the great artery of Euro- 
pean, but unquestionabty it will not be of Eng- 
lish commerce. The great docks of Antwerp 
may be amply filled with the tricolour flag; 
but they will see but few of the British pen- 
dants. In allying ourselves with the Belgians, 
we are seeking to gain the friendship of our 
natural rivals, and to strengthen what will 
soon become a province of our hereditary 
enemies; in alienating the Dutch, we are 
losing our long-established customers, and 
weakening the state, which, in every age, has 
been felt to be the outwork of British inde- 
pendence. 

But it is not the ruinous consequences of 
this monstrous coalition of the two great re- 
volutionary powers of Europe against the 
liberty and independence of the smaller states 
which are chiefly to be deplored. It is the 
shameful injustice of the proceeding, the pro- 
iligate disregard of treaties which it involves, 
the open abandonment of national honour 
which it proclaims, which constitute its worst 
features. We have not yet lived so long un 
der democratic rule as to have become habitu 



cited to the principles of iniquity, to have been 
accustomed, as in revolutionary France, to 
have spoliation palliated on the tooting of ex- 
pedience, and robbery justified by the weak- 
ness of its victim. We have not yet learned 
to measure political actions by their success; 
to praise conquest to the skies when it is on 
the side of revolution, and load patriotism 
with obloquy when it is exerted in defence of 
regulated freedom. We are confident that the 
British seamen under any circumstances will 
do their duty, and we do not see how Holland 
can resist the fearful odds which are brought 
against her; but recollecting that there is a 
moral government of nations, that there is a 
God who governs the world, and that the sins 
of the fathers, in nations as well as individuals, 
will be visited upon the children, we tremble 
to think of its consequences, and conscien- 
tiously believe that such a triumph may ulti- 
mately prove a blacker day for England, than 
if the army of Wellington had been dispersed 
in the forest of Soignies, or the fleet of Nelson 
swallowed up in the waves of Trafalgar. 

What is chiefly astonishing, and renders it 
painfully apparent that revolutionary ambition 
has produced its usual effect in confounding 
and undermining all the moral feelings of man- 
kind in this country, is the perfect indifference 
with which the partition of Holland is regarded 
by all the Movement party, as contrasted with 
the unmeasured lamentations with which they 
have made the world resound for the partition 
of Poland. Yet if the matter be impartially 
considered, it will be found that our conduct 
in leaguing with France for the partition of 
the Netherlands, has been much more infamous 
than that of the eastern potentates was in the 
subjugation of Poland. The slightest historical 
retrospect must place this in the clearest light. 

Poland was of old, and for centuries before 
her fall, the standing enemy of Russia. Twice 
the Polish armies penetrated to the heart of her 
empire, and the march of Napoleon to the 
Kremlin had been anticipated five centuries 
before by the arms of the Jagellons. Austria 
had been delivered from Turkish invasion by 
John Sobieski, but neither that power nor 
Prussia were bound to guaranty the integrity 
of the Polish dominions, nor had they ever 
been in alliance with it for any length of time 
The instability of Polish policy, arising from 
the democratic state of its government, the 
perpetual vacillation of its councils, and the 
weakness and inefficiency of its external con- 
duct, had for centuries been such that no 
lengthened or sustained operation could be ex- 
pected from its forces. It remained in the 
midst of the military monarchies a monument 
of democratic madness, a prey to the most 
frightful internal anarchy, and unable to resist 
the most inconsiderable external aggression. 
Its situation and discord rendered it the natural 
prey of its more vigorous and efficient military 
neighbours. In combining for its partition, 
they effected what was on their part an 
atrocious act of injustice; but will ultimately 
prove, as Lord Brougham long ago observed,* 
the most beneficial change for the ultimate 



* Colonial Polity. 



332 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAVS. 



happiness of its people, by forcibly repressing 
their democratical passions, and turning its 
wild but heroic spirit into the channels of 
regulated and useful patriotism. In dividing 
Poland, the three powers incurred the guilt of 
robbers who plunder a caravan, which, from 
internal divisions, is unable to defend itself; 
Austria was guilty of black ingratitude in 
assailing her former deliverer; but Russia 
violated no oaths, broke no engagements, be- 
trayed no treachery — she never owed any thing 
to Poland — she was her enemy from first to 
last, and conquered her as such. We attempt 
no vindication of this aggression ; it was the 
work of ruthless violence, alike to be stigma- 
tized in a monarchical as a republican power. 
We observe only how Providence overrules 
even human iniquity to purposes finally bene- 
ficent. 

But Avhat shall we say to the partition of the 
Netherlands, effected by France and England 
in a moment of profound peace, when its do- 
minions were guarantied by both these powers, 
and it had done nothing to provoke the hostility 
of either I Can it be denied that we, in com- 
mon with all the allied powers, guarantied to 
the King of the Netherlands his newly created 
dominions 1 The treaty of 1815 exists to dis- 
prove the assertion. Has Holland done any 
injury to Great Britain or France to justify 
their hostility 1 Has she laid an embargo on 
their ships, imprisoned their subjects, or con- 
fiscated their property] Confessedly she has 
done none of these things. Has she abandoned 
us in distress, or failed to succour us, as by 
treaty bound, in danger ] History proves the 
reverse: for one hundred and fifty years she 
has fought by our side against our common 
enemies ; she has shared alike in the disaster 
of Lafelt and Fontenoy, and the triumphs of 
Ramillies and Oudenarde, of Malplaquet and 
Waterloo. Has she injured the private or 
public interests of either of the powers who 
now assail her? Has she invaded their pro- 
vinces, or laid siege to their fortresses, or 
blockaded their harbours] The idea of Hob 
land, with her 2,500,000 souls, attempting any 
of these things against two nations who count 
above fifty millions of inhabitants in their 
dominions, is as ridiculous as it would be to 
suppose an infant in its nurse's arms to make 
war on a mounted dragoon of five-and-lwenty. 
What then has she done to provoke the par- 
tition of the lords of the earth and the ocean 1 
She has resisted the march of revolution, and 
refused to surrender her fortresses to revo- 
lutionary robbery, and therein, and therein alone, 
she has offended. 

But this is not all. Unprincipled as such 
conduct would have been, if it had been the 
whole for which this country had to blush, it 
is but a part of the share which England and 
France have taken in this deplorable trans- 
action. These powers were not only allies of 
the King of the Netherlands ; they had not only 
solemnly guarantied the integrity of his domi- 
nions, but they had accepted, with the other 
allied powers, the office of mediators and arbiters 
between him and his revolted subjects ; and 
they have now united to spoliate the party who 
made the reference. To the violence of an ordi- 



nary robber, they have superadded the abandon- 1 
ment of a friend and the partiality of a judge. 
It is this lamentable combination of unprincipled 
qualities, which makes our conduct in this 
transaction the darkest blot on our annals, and 
will ultimately render the present era one for 
which posterity will have more cause to blush 
than for that when John surrendered his do- 
minions to the Papal legate, or Charles gifted 
away to French mistresses the honour and the 
integrity of England. 

The Revolution of the Three Glorious Days, 
which has, for the last two years, steeped 
France in misery and Paris in blood, having 
excited the revolutionary party in every part 
of Europe to unheard-of transports, Brussels, 
in order not to be behind the great centre of 
democracy, rose in revolt against its sove- 
reign, and the King of Belgium was expelled 
from its walls. An attack of the Dutch troops, 
ill planned and worse executed, having been 
defeated, the King of the Netherlands applied 
to England to restore him by force to the throne 
which she had guarantied. This took place 
in October, 1830, when the Duke of Wellington 
was still in power. 

To have interfered with the land and sea 
forces of England to restore the Dutch king to 
the throne of Belgium, would, at that juncture, 
have been highly perilous. It was doubtful 
whether we were bound to have afforded such 
aid, — the guarantee contained in the treaty of 
1815 being rather intended to secure the do- 
minions of the Netherlands against foreign 
aggression, than to bind the contracting parties 
to aid him in stifling domestic revolt. At all 
events it was certain that such a proceeding 
would at once have roused the revolutionary 
party throughout Europe, and would have 
afforded France a pretext, of which she would 
instantly and gladly have availed herself, for 
interfering with her powerful armies, in favour 
of her friends, among the Belgian Jacobins. 
The Duke of Wellington, therefore, judged 
wisely, and with the prudence of a practised 
statesman, when he declined to lend such aid 
to the dispossessed monarch, and tendered the 
good ofiices of the allied powers to mediate in 
am amicable way between the contending parties. 
The proffered mediation coming from such 
powers as Russia, Austria, Prussia, France, 
and England, could not possibly have been re- 
sisted by the Dutch States ; and the offer of 
their good offices was too valuable to be de- 
clined. They agreed to the offer, and on this 
basis the London Conference assembled. This 
was the whole length that matters had gone, 
when the Duke of Wellington resigned in No- 
vember, 1830; and most unquestionably no- 
thing was farther from the intentions of the 
British ministry at that period, as the Duke of 
Wellington has repeatedly declared in Parlia- 
ment, than to have acted in any respect with- 
out the concurrence of the other powers, or to 
have made this mediation a pretext for the 
forcible partition of the Dutch dominions. 

But with the accession of the Whigs to 
power commenced a different system. They 
at once showed, from their conduct, that they 
were actuated by that unaccountable partiality 
for French democracy, which has ever since 



PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS. 



293 



1789 distinguished their party, and for which 
the great writers of its Revolution have them- 
selves not scrupled to censure Mr. Fox and all 
his adherents. " The opposition in England," 
says Madame de Stael, " with Mr. Fox at their 
head, were entirely wrong in the opinion they 
formed regarding Bonaparte ; and in conse- 
quence that party, formerly so much esteemed, 
entirely lost its ascendency in Great Britain. 
It was going farenoughto have defended the French 
Revolution through the Reign of Terror; hut no 
fault could be greater than to consider Bona- 
parte as holding to the principles of the Revo- 
lution, of which he was the ablest destroyer.'"* 
The same blind admiration for revolutionary 
France, which Lord Grey had manifested from 
the outset of his career, was imbibed with in- 
creased ardour by his whole administration, 
upon the breaking out of the Three Glorious 
Days; and the King of the Netherlands soon 
found, to his cost, that instead of an equitable 
and impartial arbitrator, he had got a ruthless 
and partial enemy at the Conference, in Great 
Britain. 

The first measure in which this altered tem- 
per was publicly manifested, was by the per- 
mission of England to Leopold to accept the 
crown of Belgium. This at once dissevered, 
and rendered irretrievable, without a general 
war, the separation of that country from Hol- 
land, because it established a revolutionary inte- 
rest, and that too of the strongest kind, dependent 
on the maintenance of that separation. This 
step was a clear departure from the equity of 
an arbitrator and a judge, because it rendered 
final and irrevocable the separation which it 
was the object of the mediation to heal, and 
which, but for the establishment of that revo- 
lutionary interest, would speedily have been 
closed. In truth, the Belgians were, after a 
year's experience, so thoroughly disgusted 
with their revolution ; they had suffered so 
dreadfully under the tyrants of their own 
choosing; starvation and misery had stalked 
in so frightful a manner through their popu- 
lous and once happy streets, that they were 
rapidly becoming prepared to have returned 
tinder the mild government of the House of 
Orange, when this decisive step, by establish- 
ing a revolutionary interest on the throne, for 
ever blighted these opening prospects of re- 
turning tranquillity and peace. 

But the matter did not rest here. France 
and England concluded a treaty in July, 1831, 
eight months after the accession of the Whigs 
to office , a treaty by which they guarantied to 
Leopold liin revolutionary dominions, including 
that part of territory which included Maes- 
tricht, the frontier fortress of the old United Pro- 
vince*, with the noble fortress of Luxemburg; 
and the free navigation of the Scheldt. Tins 
outrageous step was ruinous to Holland. The 
terms which it imposed on the King of the 
Netherlands, especially the surrender of Maes- 
tricht and Luxemburg, and the navigation of 
Dutch waters by the Belgians, were utterly 
destructive of that country. It was the same 
thing as if the free navigation of the Mersey 
and the Thames had been guarantied to the 



* Rev. Franc, ii. 270. 



manufacturers of France and Belgium. The 
guarantee of Limburg and Luxemburg, includ- 
ing Maestricht, to Belgium, was still more un- 
pardonable, because Luxemburg was part of 
the old patrimonii of the House of Nassau, and 
Limburg, with its barrier fortress Maestricht, 
was no part of Belgium, but of Holland, proper- 
ly so calkd. Holland could not part with them, 
if she had the slightest regard to her future 
safely. After Maestricht, its old bulwai :■: on the 
side of France, and Antwerp, its new bulwark 
on the side of Flanders, were lost, its inde- 
pendence was an empty name. 

Determined to perish rather than yield to 
such ruinous conditions, the King of the Ne- 
therlands declared war against the new King 
of Belgium, and then was seen what a slight 
hold the revolutionary party possessed of the 
| Flemish people. The revolutionary rabble 
were defeated in two pitched battles ; the 
fumes of the Belgian revolt were dissipated; 
counter movements were beginning in Ghent 
and the principal towns in the Netherlands, 
and Brussels was within half an hour of fall- 
ing into the hands of its lawful monarch, 
when the armies of France and the fleet of 
England, yielding to the demand of Leopold, 
and bound by the guarantee contained in the 
revolutionary treaty, advanced to support the 
cause of revolution. The consequences might 
easily have been foreseen. The armies of 
Holland were checked in the mid-career of 
victory, Brussels preserved for its cowardly 
revolutionary tyrants, and the ulcer of the 
Belgian revolts, when on the point of being- 
closed, preserved open in the centre of Eu- 
rope. 

The King of the Netherlands gained some- 
thing by this vigorous step; the French saw 
the utter worthlessness of their revolutionary 
allies; the crying injustice of demanding the 
cession of Maestricht and Luxemburg became 
too great even for the governments of the me- 
diating powers, and the protocols took a new 
direction. Antwerp, and a free navigation of 
the Dutch waters, became now the great ob- 
ject on which France and England insisted, 
though it involved, by transferring the trade 
of the United Provinces to the Belgian territo- 
ry, the most serious injury of Holland. That 
is the point which has since been insisted on; 
that is the object for which we are now to 
plunge into an iniquitous and oppressive war. 

Shortly afterwards, an event took place, 
which, bv drawing still closer the revolution- 
ary bonds between France and Belgium, de- 
veloped still farther the system of aggression 
to which England had in an evil hour lent the 
weight of her once venerated authority. Leo- 
pold married the daughter of Louis Philippe, 
and Flanders became in effect, as well as in 
form, a French province. This event might 
have been foreseen, and was foreseen, from the 
moment that he ascended the throne of that 
country. It was well known in the higher 
classes in London, that Leopold had more than 
once proposed to his present queen, before the Ecl~ 
gian revolt: that it was her disinclination to 
go to Greece which made hi in refuse the 
crown of that country; and that the moment 
he mounted the throne of Belgium, he would 



294 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



become the son-in-law of the King of France. 
All this was distinctly known ; it was well un- 
derstood, that if Antwerp was demanded for 
Belgium, it was in effecl demanded for France, 
and that the establishment of the tricolour flag 
on the great arsenals and dockyards of that 
city, was the necessary result of making it a 
sine qua non of the pacification of the Nether- 
lands. All this, we repeat, was thoroughly 
known before Leopold was counselled by our 
administration to accept the throne of Bel- 
gium, or Antwerp was seriously insisted upon 
at the Conference; and it was in the full 
knowledge of that consequence that he was 
placed on that throne, and the cession of that 
great outwork of revolutionary France impe- 
riously demanded by the French and English 
plenipotentiaries. And it is in the full know- 
ledge that this effect must follow, that a war is 
now undertaken by England, the effect of 
which may be to throw Europe into confla- 
gration, and the consequences of which no 
man can foresee. 

And what is the present state of the Belgian 
question ? The King of the Netherlands, like 
a worthy descendant of the House of Nassau, 
refuses to surrender Antwerp to the single de- 
mand of France and England, but agrees to 
submit all disputes regarding it to the joint 
arbitration of the five allied powers. The five 
powers were the umpires originally chosen ; 
and the Jive alone have any legal or equitable 
title to interfere in the matter. But how stands 
the fact now ? Have the five powers, whose 
united and balanced judgment was relied on 
by the parties to the arbitration — have they all- 
combined in the measures of violence against 
Holland? Quite the reverse: Austria, Rus- 
sia, and Prussia, a majority of the arbiters, 
have solemnly protested against such a mea- 
sure, and its prosecution is likely to involve 
France and England in a desperate contest 
with these Northern potentates. Who then 
insists on the spoliation 1 A minority of the 
arbiters ; revolutionary France and revolu- 
tionary England : revolutionary France, pant- 
ing tp regain the frontier of the Rhine, and 
secure the great fortified harbour of Antwerp, 
as an advanced post frora whence to menace 
our independence ; and revolutionary England 
following with submissive steps, like the Cisal- 
pine or Batavian republic, in the wake of the 
great parent democracy. And this is the first 
fruits of the government of the Whigs. 

This puts, in the clearest point of view, the 
extravagant injustice of our present attack on 
Dutch independence. The mediation of the 
five powers was accepted; the five, taken 
jointly, have (dune the power of fixing the 
award. Three hold out, and refuse to accede 
to the violent measures which are now pro- 
posed ; but two, carried away by an adverse 
interest, and having formed a marriage con- 
nection with one of the submitting parties, in- 
sist upon instantaneous measures of spoliation. 
What title have the two to drop the pen and take 
tip the sword, in order to enforce measures 
which the other three refuse to sanction 1 Who 
gave France and England, taken singly, any 
rights to act as arbiters between Belgium and 
Holland \ Who authorized the fleets and ar- 



j mies of the great democratic powers to parti- 
tion the dominions of the King of the Nether- 
lands, and force him to give up what his re- 
volted subjects have not been able to wresf 
from him 7 It won't do to say, they derived 
the power from the acquiescence of the King 
of the Netherlands, in the forcible mediation of 
the Allied Powers; for what he acquiesced in 
was the pacific arbitration of the five, and not 
the hostile intervention of the tiro. From what 
then do they derive their right? From the 
same title which Russia has to the partition of 
Poland ; the right of the strongest ; the title of 
a revolutionary state to extend and strengthen 
all the subordinate revolutionary dynasties with 
which in terror at a righteous retribution it 
has strengthened its sides. 

Setting aside, therefore, altogether the obvi- 
ous and crying inexpedience of this war, 
which is to restore to France that important 
naval station so threatening to England, which 
it took us so much blood and treasure to wrest 
from her in the last war; setting aside the ex- 
treme impolicy of irritating and spoliating our 
best customers and oldest allies, in the hope- 
less idea of winning the favour of a fickle and 
jealous manufacturing rabble ; what we chiefly 
view with alarm is, the monstrous injustice 
and gross partiality of our conduct ; the total 
disregard of the faith of treaties, and the obli- 
gations of centuries which it involves, and the 
deplorable degradation to which it reduces 
England, in compelling her, instead of stand- 
ing forward in the vanguard of freedom, to 
follow an obsequious vassal in the train of 
Gallic usurpation. Not if her fleets were sunk, 
or her armies defeated, — not if Portsmouth 
was in ashes or Woolwich in flames, — not if 
the Tower of London bore the flag of an ene- 
my and the tombs of Westminster Abbey were 
rifled by foreign bands, in defence of our liber- 
ties in a just cause, would we think so de- 
spondingly of our destinies, would we feel so 
humbled in our national feelings, as we do at 
thus witnessing the English'pendant following 
the tricolour flag in a crusade against the 
liberty of nations. We have descended at 
once from the pinnacle of glory to the depths 
of humiliation; from being the foremost, in the 
bands of freedom, to being last in the train of ty- 
ranny ; from leading the world against a despot 
in arms, to crouching at the feet of our van- 
quished enemy. That which an hundred de- 
feats could not have done, a disgrace which 
the loss of an hundred sail of the line, or the 
stormine of an hundred fortresses could not 
have induced upon Old England, has been vo- 
luntarily incurred by New England, to obtain 
the smiles of a revolutionary throne. Well 
and justly has Providence punished the people 
of this country for the democratic madness of 
the last two years. That which all the might 
of Napoleon could not effect, the insanity of 
her own rulers has produced; and the nation 
which bade defiance to Europe in arms, has 
sunk down before the idol of revolutionary 
ambition. "Ephraim," says the Scripture, 
" has gone to his idols ; let him alone." 

Suppose that La Vendee, which is not im- 
possible, were to revolt against Louis Philippe, 
and by a sudden effort expel the troops of the 



PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS. 



295 



French monarch from the west of France — 
that the Allied Powers of Russia, Austria, and 
Prussia, were then to interfere, and declare 
that the first shot fired by the Citizen King at 
his revolted subjects, would be considered by 
them as a declaration of war against the Holy 
Alliance; that, intimidated by such formidable 
neighbours, Fiance was to agree to their medi- 
al urn ; thai immediately a monarch of the le- 
gitimate race were to be placed by the Allies, 
without the concurrence of Louis Philippe, 
on the throne of Western Fiance, and he were 
to be married with all due expedition to an 
archduchess of Austria; and that shortly after, 
a decree should be issued by the impartial me- 
diators, declaring that Lyons was to be an- 
nexed to the newly erected dynasty, and that 
in exchange Tours should be surrendered to 
the republican party ; and that upon the French 
king refusing to accede to such iniquitous 
terms, the armies of the Holy Alliance were to 
march to the Rhine. How would Europe be 
made to ring from side to side, by the revolu- 
tionary press, at such a partition; and how 
loudly would they applaud the Citizen King 
for having the firmness to resist the attempt 1 
And yet this is what France and England are 
now doing, with the applause of all the liberal 
press of Europe; and it is for such intrepid 
conduct on the part of the King of the Nether- 
lands, that he is now the object of their oblo- 
quy and derision. 

Ireland, which is perhaps as likely to happen, 
revolts against England. She shows her 
gratitude for the important concessions of the 
last fifty years, by throwing off the yoke of 
her benefactor, and proclaims a republican 
form of government. The Allied Powers, with 
France at their head, instantly interfere — de- 
clare that the first shot fired by England at her 
revolted subjects, will be considered as a de- 
claration of war against all Europe, but offer, 
at the same time, their good offices and media- 
tion to effect a settlement of the differences be- 
tween Great Britain and the Emerald Isle. 
Weakened by so great a defection, and over- 
awed by no formidable a coalition, England re- 
luctantly consents to the arbitration, and a 
truce is proclaimed between the adverse par- 
ties. Immediately the Abies declare, that the 
separation must be permanent ; that "it is evi- 
dent" that England's means of regaining her 
lost di i are at an end, and that the 

peace of Europe must be no longer compro- 
by the disputes between the Irish and 
b. people. Suiting the action to the word, 
they forthwith put a foreign prince, without the 
consent of '•■ a the Irish throne, and, 

to secure his independence of Great Britain, 
many him to the u r of the King of 
France. Immediately after, the Allied Powers 
make a treaty, by which Ireland is gunranlied 
to the r ■ arj king; and it is declared 

that the new kingdom is to embrace Plymouth, 
and hav< rij lit to the free navigation of the 
Mersey. Upon England's resisting the ini- 
quitous partition, a French and Russian army, 
a hundred and fifty thousand strong, prepare 
for a descent on the shores of Kent. What 
would the English people, and the friends of 
freedom throughout the world, say to such a 



proceeding 1 Yet this is precisely what the 
English people have been led, blindfold, by 
their Whig rulers, and the revolutionary press, 
to do ! If his character is not totally destroyed, 
terrible will be the wakening of the Lion when 
he is roused from his slumber. 

The hired journals of government, sensible 
that the conduct of their rulers on this vital 
question will not bear examination, endeavour 
to lay it upon the shoulders of the Allied Powers, 
and affect to lament the meshes in which 
they were left by the foreign policy of Lord 
Aberdeen. Of all absurdities, this is the great- 
est; Russia, Prussia, and Austria, are so far 
from sanctioning the attack on the King of 
the Netherlands, that they have solemnly pro- 
tested against it; and Prussia, preparing to 
second her words by blows, has concentrated 
her armies on the Meuse. The King of the Ne- 
therlands professes his willingness still to sub- 
mit the question of Antwerp and the Scheldt to 
the five Allied Powers, though he refuse to 
yield them up to the imperious demand of two 
of them. How, then, is it possible to involve 
the other Allied Powers in an iniquity of which 
they positively disapprove, and for which they 
are preparing to make war 1 True, they signed 
the treaty which gave Antwerp to Belgium, 
and their reasons for doing so, and the grounds 
on which they are to justify it, we leave it to 
them and their paid journalists to unfold. But 
they have positively refused to sanction the 
employment of force to coerce the Dutch; and 
without that, the revolutionary rabble of Bel- 
gium may thunder for ever against the citadel 
of Antwerp. 

But because the three powers who signed 
the treaty for the partition of Poland, have also 
signed the treaty for the partition of the Nether- 
lands, is that any vindication for our joining 
in the spoliation 1 When two robbers unite to 
waylay a traveller, is it any excuse for them 
that three others have agreed to the conspiracy 1 ? 
We were told that arbitrary despotic govern- 
ments alone commit injustice, and that with 
the triumph of the people, and the extension 
of democracy, the rule of justice and equity 
was to commence. How then are revolu- 
tionary France and revolutionary England the 
foremost in the work of partition, when the 
other powers, ashamed of their signature at 
the disgraceful treaty, hang back, and refuse 
to put it in force! Is this the commencement 
if the fair rule of democratic justice? A 
treaty, which the three absolute powers, the^ar- 
itioners of Poland, are ashamed of, the revolu- 
tionary powers have no scruple in enforcing 
— an iniquity which Russia and Austria refuse 
to commit, France and England are ready to 
perpetrate! 

The pretence that Ave are involved in all this 
through the diplomacy of the Tories, is such a 
monstrous perversion of truth as cannot blind 
an}' but the most ignorant readers. When 
was the treaty which guarantied Leopold's 
dominions signed by France and England! in 
July, 1831; eight months after the accession 
of the Whigs to office. When was the treaty, 
giving Antwerp to Belgium, signed by the five 
powers ! In November, 1831, a year after the 
retirement of the Duke of Wellington from 



296 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



power. What treaty did the Duke of Welling- 
ton leave binding on his successors, in regard 
to Belgium 1 The treaty of 1815, which gua- 
rantied to the King of the Netherlands his 
whole dominions. What incipient mediation 
did he leave them to complete? That of the 
five Allied Powers, for the pacific settlement of 
the Belgian question. And yet we arc told he 
involved Great Britain in a hostile aggression 
on Holland, and was the author of a measure 
of robbery by two of the mediating powers! 

To give a show of equity to their spoliation, 
the revolutionary powers have summoned 
Leopold to surrender Venloo, and declare that 
Holland is to retain Luxemburg and Lim- 
burg. This is a mere colourable pretext, desti- 
tute of the least weight, and too flimsy to de- 
ceive any one acquainted with the facts. Lux- 
emburg always was in the hands of the 
Dutch ; it formed part of the old patrimony of 
the house of Nassau, and the Belgians have 
no more right to that great fortress, or its ter- 
ritory, than they have to Magdebourg or Lisle. 
Venloo is a fortress of third-rate importance, 
about as fair an equivalent for Antwerp as 
Conway would be for Liverpool. Who ever 
heard of any works of Napoleon on Venloo, or 
any effort on his part to retain it as part of the 
outworks of his conquering dominions 1 Ven- 
loo is situated on the right or German bank 
of the Meuse, and never belonged to Belgium ; 
so that to consider it as a compensation for the 
great and magnificent fortress of Antwerp, the 
key of the Scheldt, is as absurd as it would be 
to speak of Harwich as a compensation for 
London. 

Hitherto we have argued the question on the 
footing of the real merits of the points at issue, 
and not the subordinate question on which the 
negotiations finally broke off. But here, too, 
the injustice of the proceeding is not less 
manifest than in the general nature of the 
transaction. 

It wa'i stipulated by the treaty of 15th No- 
vember, 1821, signed by all the Allied Powers, 
that the evacuation of the provinces to be mu- 
tually ceded on both sides, should take place 
after the exchange of the ratification of a final 
peace. Of course, Antwerp was held by Hol- 
land, and Venloo by Belgium, until that event; 
and on that footing they have been held for the 
last twelve months. 

But what do France and England now require ] 
Why, that Antwerp should be ceded by Hol- 
land before the treaty is either signed or agreed 
to, and when weighty matters are still in de- 
pendence between the contracting parties. 
The advantages which the King of the Ne- 
therlands holds, the security he possesses by 
holding that great fortress, is to be instantly 
abandoned, and he is to be left, without any se- 
curity, to the tender mercies of the father-in-law 
of his enemy, and the friendly sympathy of 
their democratic allies in this island. Is this 
justl Is it consistent with the treaty of No- 
vember, 1831, on which England and France 
justify their armed interference ? Is it not 
evidently a violation of both 1 and does not it 
leave the revolutionary states as much in the 
wrong on the last disputed point of the Con- 
ference as on its general spirit] 



The answer of the King of the Netherlands 
to the summons of France and England to 
surrender the citadel of Antwerp, is so deci- 
sive of the justice of his cause on this point, 
that we cannot refrain from quoting it: — 

"Holland having acceded, not to the treaty 
of the 15th of November, 1831, but to the 
greater part of its arrangements, must found 
its proceedings on the stipulations which it 
has accepted. Among the articles agreed to in 
concert with the Conference of London, is in- 
cluded the evacuation, in a fixed lime after the 
exchange of the ratifications of the territories 
which were respectively to change hands, 
which point was regulated by the last of the 
24 articles of 15th October, 1831, by the treaty 
of 15th November, and in the projects of con- 
vention which have followed it. If, on the 
11th June, the Conference proposed the 20th 
July, for the evacuation of the respective ter- 
ritories, it declared, by its note of 20th July, 
that in making this proposal, it had thought 
that the treaty between Holland and Belgium 
would be ratified. To effect the evacuation at 
a time anterior to the exchange of the ratifica- 
tions, would be acting in opposition both to 
the formally announced intentions of the Con- 
ference, and to the assent which has been 
given to them by the government of the Ne- 
therlands.'' 

"It is true," says the Times, " that the terri- 
tories were not to be evacuated on each side 
till the ratifications of a general peace are ex- 
changed." This puts an end to the argument : 
we have not a shadow of justice for our de- 
mand of the immediate evacuation of Antwerp, 
any more than for the preceding treaty, which 
assigned it to Belgium. 

The war in which, to serve their new and 
dearly-beloved revolutionary allies, and enable 
them to regain their menacing point to our 
shores, we are now about to be involved, may 
last ten days or ten years : it may cost 500,000/. 
or 500,000,000?.: all that is in the womb of 
fate, and of that we know nothing; but the 
justice of the case in either event remains the 
same. That which is done is done, and can- 
not be undone: the signature of England has 
been affixed to the treaty with revolutionary 
France for the partition of our allies, and there 
it will remain for ever, to call down the judg- 
ment of Heaven upon the guilty nation which 
permitted, and the execrations of posterity on 
the insane administration which effected it. 

In this war, our rulers have contrived to get 
us into such a situation, that by no possibility 
can we derive either honour, advantage, or se- 
curity, from the consequences to which it may 
lead. If the French and English are victorious, 
and we succeed in storming the citadel of 
Antwerp for the tricolour flag, will England be 
a gainer by the victory — will our commerce 
be improved by surrendering the navigation 
of the Scheldt into the hands of the jealous 
manufacturers of France and Belgium, and 
for ever alienating our old and willing custom- 
ers in the United Provinces] Will our na- 
tional security be materially improved by 
placing the magnificent dockyards, and spa- 
cious arsenals, and impregnable fortifications, 
which Napoleon erected for our subjugation, 



PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS. 



297 



in the hands of a revolutionary King of France 
and his warlike and able prime minister'? If 
we arc defeated, is the honour of England, the 
conqueror of France, likely to be upheld, or its 
influence increased, by our inability to bully a 
fifth-rate power, even with the aid of our Jaco- 
bin allies? Whatever occurs, whether Hol- 
land submits in five days, or holds out bravely 
and nobly for five years; whether the united 
tricolour and the leopard are victorious or are 
vanquished, we can derive nothing but humili- 
ation, danger, and disgrace from the event. 
We shall certainly incur all the losses and bur- 
dens of war : we can never obtain either its 
advantages or its glories. 

Every man in England may possibly soon 
be compelled to ten pounds in the hundred to 
undo the whole fruits of our former victories, 
and give back Antwerp to France ! ! ! And give 
back Antwerp to France.'.'! This is the first 
fruits of our Whig diplomacy, and our new 
revolutionary alliance. Will the surrender of 
Portsmouth or Plymouth, or of an hundred 
ships of the line, be the second?* 

In making these observations, we disclaim 
all idea of imputing to ministers any inten- 
tional or wilful abandonment of the interests 
and honour of England. We believe that as 
Englishmen and gentlemen, they are incapa- 
ble of such baseness. What we assert is, that 
the passion for innovation, and their long-esta- 
blished admiration of France, have blinded 
their eyes ; that they are as incapable of see- 
ing the real consequences of their actions, as 
a young man is in the first fervour of love, or 
an inmate of bedlam in a paroxysm of insanity. 

From this sickening scene of aggression, 
spoliation, and robbery, we turn with pride and 
admiration to the firm and dignified, yet mild 
and moderate language of the Dutch govern- 
ment There was a time, when their conduct 
in resisting the partition of their country by 
two powerful and overbearing revolutionary 
neighbours, would have called forth the unani- 
mous sympathy and admiration of the British 
people : when they would have compared it to 
the long glories of the House of Nassau, and 
the indomitable courage of that illustrious 
chief, who, when the armies of Louis XIV. 
were at the gates of Amsterdam, declared that 
he knew one way to avoid seeing the disgrace 
of his country, and that was to die in the last 
ditch. We cannot believe that revolutionary 
passions should have so completely changed 
the nature of a whole people in so short a lime. 
as to render them insensible to such heroic 
conduct: at all events, for the honour of hu- 
man nature, we cannot forbear the gratifica- 
tion of adorning our pages by the following 
quotation from the last reply of the States- 
General of Holland to the speech of the King 
of the Netherlands, announcing the approach- 
ing attack of France and England. 

" Never did the States-General approach the 
throne with feelings similar to those of the 
presen. moment. They had fostered the well- 



*Of course the surrender of Antwerp tn revolutionary 
Helsiii!.'), governed by tlie son-in-law of France, is, in 
other words, a surrender to the great parent democracy 

itself. 



grounded hope that equitable arrangements 
would have put a period to the pressure on the 
country, but this just expectation has been dis- 
appointed. The States-General are grieved at 
the course of the negotiations. Whilst we are 
moderate and indulgent, demands are made on 
us which are in opposition to the honour and 
the independence of the nation ; a small but 
glorious state is sacrificed to a presumed gene- 
ral interest. It makes a deep impression to 
see that foreign powers entertain a feeling in 
favour of a people torn from us by violence 
and perfidy — a feeling leading to our destruc- 
tion — instead of experiencing from the great 
powers aid in upholding our rights. The 
clouds that darken the horizon might lead to 
discouragement, were it not for the conviction 
of the nation that she does not deserve this 
treatment, and that the moral energy which en- 
abled her to make the sacrifices already ren- 
dered, remains in undiminished strength to 
support her in the further sacrifices necessary 
for the conservation of the national indepen- 
dence; that energy ever shone most brilliant 
when the country was most in danger, and had 
to resist the superior forces of united enemies ; 
that energy enabled her to re-establish her po- 
litical edifice which had been demolished by 
the usurper; and the same energy must, under 
our king, maintain that edifice against the 
usurpatory demands or attacks of an unjust 
defection. 

" The result is anticipated with confidence. 
The nation glories in her powerful means of 
defence, and in her sea and land forces, which 
are in arms to obtain equitable terms of the 
peace that is still so anxiously solicited. 

" The charges are heavy, but the circum- 
stances that render them necessary are unex- 
ampled; and there is no native of the country 
who would not cheerfully make the utmost 
sacrifices when the honour and independence 
of the nation are endangered. Much may be 
conceded for the sake of the peace of Europe, 
but self-preservation puts a limit to conces- 
sions when they have, approached to the ut- 
most boundary. The Netherlands have ever 
made, willingly, great sacrifices for the defence 
of their rights ; but never have they volunta- 
rily relinquished their national existence, and 
many times they have defended them with 
small numerical forces against far superior 
numbers. This same feeling now glows in 
every heart; and still there is the God of our 
forefathers, who has preserved us in times of 
the most imminent peril. In unison with their 
king, the States-General put their confidence 
in God; and, strong as they are in their unani- 
mity of sentiments, and in the justice of their 
cause, they confidently look forward to the re- 
ward of a noble and magnanimous perseve- 
rance." 

The revolutionary journals of England call 
this the obstinacy of the king of Holland. Tt 
is obstinacy. It is the same obstinacy as Le- 
onidas showed at Thermopylae, and Themisto- 
cles at Salarnis, and the Roman senate after 
the battle of Cannae, and the Swiss at Morgar- 
ten, and the Dutch at Haarlem ; the obstinacy 
which commands the admiration of men 
through every succeeding age, and, even 



298 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



amidst the injustice of this world, secures the 
blessing of Heaven. 

The Dutch may have Antwerp wrested from 
them; they may be compelled, from inability 
to resist, to surrender it to the Allies. All that 
will not alter the case ; it will not ultimately 
avert an European war; it will not the less 
prove fatal to the progress of freedom. The 
Allies, and above all, England, allow the key to 
the Scheldt, and the advanced post of France 
against Britain, to remain in the hands of the 
French, or, what is the same thing, their sub- 
sidiary ally, the Belgians. In every age the 
establishment of the French power in Flan- 
ders has led to an European war; that in 
which a revolutionary force is intrenched 
there, is not destined to form an exception. 
A war of opinion must ensue sooner or later, 
when the tricolour standard is brought down 
to the Scheldt, and the eagle of Prussia floats 
on the Meuse. When that event comes, as 
come it will, then will England, whether re- 
publican or monarchical, lie compelled to exert 
her force to drive back the French to their old 
frontier. A second war must be undertaken to 
regain what a moment of weakness and infatu- 
ation has lost in the first. 

But what will be the result of such a war, 
provoked by the revolutionary ambition of 
France, and the tame subservience of England, 
on the interests of freedom ? If revolutionary 
ambition prevails, what chance has liberty of 
surviving amidst the tyranny of democratic 
power ? If legitimate authority conquers, how 
■can it exist amidst the Russian and Austrian 
bayonets? When will real freedom again be 
restored as it existed in France under the mild 
sway of the Bourbons ; or as prosperous a 
period be regained for that distracted country, 
as that which elapsed from 1815 to 18301 It 
is evident, that freedom must perish in the 
fierce contest between democratic and veirai 
tyranny: it is hard to say, whether it has most 
to fear from the triumph of the French or the 
Russian bayonets. To their other claims to 
the abhorrence of mankind, the liberals of 
England, like the Jacobins of France, will add 
that of being the assassins of real liberty 
throughout the world. 

It is sometimes advantageous to see the light 
in which the conduct of Great Britain is view- 
ed in foreign states. The following article is 
from the Manheim Gazette of the 8th inst: — 
" The French ministry and the English Whigs 
have in vain asserted that they do not mean to 
rule by the principle of propagandism; these 
assurances are no guarantee, since propagand- 
ism subsists in the system they have establish- 
ed, and cannot cease till that system is at an 
end. The delegates of the people, for in this 
light must be viewed all governments founded 
upon the principle of popular sovereignty, 
must of necessity seek their allies among 
other delegates of the same character; and to 
endeavour to find friends amonq; their neigh- 
bours, is to act as if they sought to revolution- 
ize such states as profess the monarchical 
principle. In this respect the influence of the 
Grey ministry is more pernicious than that of 
the French ministry. The former having com- 
menced by revolutionizing England, and feel- 



ing itself closely pressed by a reaction at 
home, feels a greater desire to form alliances 
with other nations ; and consequently it is less 
solicitous about treaties and rights than France, 
who would unite herself more readily with 
monarchical states, if she were not restrained 
by the alliance with England. It is evident 
that England now occupies the place which 
was occupied by France after the revolution. 
Already the Grey ministry finds itself com- 
pelled to repair one extreme resolution by an- 
other; and in a very short time, repose, order, 
and peace, will become impossible. We re- 
peat, therefore, that it is the Grey ministry 
which threatens the peace of Europe." Such 
is the light in which our government is viewed 
by the continental powers, and such the alarm 
which they feel at the threatened attack on 
Holland by the two revolutionary states ; and 
yet we are told by the partisans of administra- 
tion, that they are going to attack Antwerp " to 
preserve the peace of Europe" 

The ministerial journals have at length let 
out the real motive of our conduct; the Times 
tells us that it is useless to blink the question, 
for if the French and English do not attack 
Antwerp together, France will attack it alone, 
and that this would infallibly bring on a gene- 
ral war. That is to say, we have got into the 
company of a robber who is bent upon assail- 
ing a passenger upon the highway, and to pre- 
vent murder we join the robber in the attack. Did 
it never occur to our rulers, that there was a 
more effectual way to prevent the iniquity? 
and that is to get out of such bad company, 
and defend the traveller. Would France ever 
venture to attack Antwerp if she were not 
supported by England ? Would she ever do 
so if England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, 
were leagued together to prevent the march of 
revolutionary ambition? On whom then do 
the consequences of the aggression clearly 
rest ? On the English government, who, 
against the interests and honour of England, 
join in the attack, when they hold the balance 
in their hands, and by a word could prevent it. 

It is evident that it is this portentous alliance 
of France and England which really threatens 
the peace of Europe, and must ultimately lead 
to a universal war. The Manheim Gazette 
is perfectly right ; it is the Grey administration 
who head the revolutionary crusade. Holding 
the balance in our hands, we voluntarily throw 
our decisive weight into the scales of aggres- 
sion, and the other powers must unite to restore 
the beam. 

The years of prosperity will not endure for 
ever to' England, any more than to any earthly 
thin?. The evil days will come when the 
grandeur of an old and venerated name will 
sink amidst the storms of adversity ; when her 
vast and unwieldy empire will be dismember- 
ed, and province after province fall away from 
her mighty dominions. When these days 
come, as come they will, then will she feel 
what it was to have betrayed and insulted her 
allies in the' plenitude of her power. When 
Ireland rises in open rebellion against her do- 
minion; when the West Indies are lost, and 
with them the right arm of her naval strength; 
when the armies of the continent crowd the 



KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA. 



299 



coasts of Flanders, and the navies of Europe 
are assembled in the Scheldt, to humble the 
mistress of the waves, then will she feel how 
deeply, how irreparably, her character has 
suffered from the infatuation of the last two 
years. In vain will she call on her once faith- 
ful friends in Holland or Portugal to uphold 
the cause of freedom; in vain will she appeal 
to the world against the violence with which 
she is menaced ; her desertion of her allies in 
the hour of their adversity, her atrocious alli- 
ance with revolutionary violence, will rise up 
in judgment against her. When called on for 
aid, they will answer, did you aid us in the day 
of trial 1 when reminded of the alliance of an 
hundred and fifty years, they will point to the 
partition of 1832. England may expiate by 
suffering the disgrace of her present defec- 
tion ; efface it from the minds of men she 
never will. 

The conservative administration of England 



have had many eulogists, but they have had 
none who have established their reputation 
so effectually as their successors : Mr. Pitt's 
glory might have been doubtful in the eyes of 
posterity, had he not been succeeded by Lord 
Grey. The contrast between the firmness, in- 
tegrity, and good faith of the one, and the 
vacillation, defection, and weakness of the 
other, will leave an impression on the minds 
of men which will never be effaced. The mag 
nitude of the perils from which we were saved 
by the first, have been proved by the dangers 
we have incurred under the second; the lustre 
of the intrepidity of the former, by the disgrace 
and humiliation of the latter. To the bright 
evening of England's glory, has succeeded the 
darkness of revolutionary night: may it be as 
brief as it has heen gloom)', and be followed 
by the rise of the same luminary in a brighter 
morning, gilded by colours of undecaying 
beauty ! 



KAKAMSIN'S RUSSIA/ 



Never was there a more just observation, 
than that there is no end to authentic history. 
We shall take the most learned and enthusi- 
astic student of history in the country; one 
who has spent half his life in reading the an- 
nals of human events, and still we are confi- 
dent that much of what is about to be stated in 
this article will be new to him. Yet it relates 
to no inconsiderable state, and is to be found 
in no obscure writer. It relates to the history 
of Russia, the greatest and most powerful em- 
pire, if we except Great Britain, which exists 
upon the earth, and with which, — sometimes 
in alliance, — sometimes in jealousy, — we have 
been almost continually brought in contact 
during the last half century. It is to be found 
in the history of Karamsin, the greatest his- 
torian of Russia, who has justly acquired an 
European reputation; but M'hose great work, 
though relating to so interesting a subject, has 
hitherto, in an unaccountable manner, been 
neglected in this country. 

We complain that there is nothing new in 
literature, — that old ideas are perpetually re- 
curring, and worn-out topics again dressed up 
in a new garb, — that sameness and imitation 
seem to be irrevocably stamped upon our 
literature, and the age of original thought, of 
fresh ideas, and creative genius, has passed 
away! Rely upon it, the fault is not in the 
nature of things, but in ourselves. The stock 
of original ideas, of new thoughts, of fresh 
images, is not worn out; on the contrary, it 
has hardly been seriously worked upon by 
all the previous efforts of mankind. We may 
say of it, as Newton did of his discoveries 
in physical science, that "all that he had done 
seemed like a boy playing on the sea-shore, 
finding sometimes a brighter pebble or a 



* Karamsin, Ilistoire de Russie, 11 vols. Paris, 1810— 
J828. Foreign and Colonial Review, No. VII. July, 
1811. 



smoother shell than ordinary, while the great 
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before 
him." We complain of sameness of thought, 
of want of originality in topics, and yet we live 
in the midst of a boundless profusion of new 
facts and virgin images, for the first time 
brought forward by our extended intercourse 
with all parts of the world, and the heart-stir- 
ring events of our political history. There 
never was a period in the annals of mankind, 
if we except that of the discovery of America, 
in which new facts and novel images, and the 
materials for original thought, were brought 
with such profusion to the hand of genius ; and 
there never was one in which, in this country 
at least, so little use was made of them, or in 
which the public mind seems to revolve so 
exclusively round one centre, and in one beaten 
and wellnigh worn-out orbit. 

Whence has arisen this .strange discrepancy 
between the profusion with which new mate- 
rials and fresh objects are brought to hand, 
and the scanty proportion in which original 
thought is poured out to the world? — The 
cause is to be found in the impossibility of 
getting the great majority of me-.! to make the 
"past or the future predominant over the pre- 
sent." If we add " t he absent" to the famous 
apothegm of Johnson, we shall have a sum- 
mary of the principal causes which in ordinary 
times chain mankind to the concentric circles 
of established ideas. Amidst common events, 
and under the influence of no peculiar excite- 
ment, men are incapable of extricating them- 
selves from the ocean of habitual thought with 
which they are surrounded. A few great men 
may do so, but their ideas produce no impres- 
sion on the age, and lie wellnigh dormant till 
they are brought to fructify and spread amidst 
the turbulence or sufferings of another. Thence 
the use of periods of suffering or intense ex- 
citement to the growth of intellect, and th« 



300 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



development of truth. The past and the future 
are then made the present ; ages of experience, 
volumes of speculation, are then concentrated 
into the passing results of a few years, and 
thus spread generally throughout mankind. 
What original thought was evolved in England 
during the fervour of the Reformation ! in 
France, during the agonies of the Revolution! 
Subsequent centuries' of ease and peace to 
each were but periods of transfer and amplifi- 
cation, — of studied imitation and laboured 
commentary. There has been, there still is, 
original thought in our age; but it is confined 
to those whom the agitation of reform roused 
from the intellectual lethargy with which they 
were surrounded, and their opinions have not 
yet come to influence general thought. They 
will do so in the next generation, and direct 
the course of legislation in the third. Public 
opinion, of which so much is said, is nothing 
but the re-echo of the opinions of the great 
among our fathers, — legislation among our 
grandfathers ; so slowly, under the wise sys- 
tem of providence, is truth and improvement 
let down to a benighted world! 

We have been forcibly led to these observa- 
tions by the stud)' of Karamsin's History of 
Russia, and the immense stores of new facts 
and novel ideas which are to be found in a 
work long accessible in its French translation 
to all, hardly as yet approached by any- We 
are accustomed to consider Russia as a country 
which has only been extricated by the genius 
of Peter the Great, little more than a century 
and a half ago, from a state of barbarism, and 
the annals of which have been lost amidst 
general ignorance, or are worthy of no regard 
till they were brought into light by the in- 
creasing intercourse with the powers of west- 
ern Europe. Such, we are persuaded, is the 
belief of ninety-nine out of an hundred, even 
among learned readers, in every European 
state; yet we perceive from Karamsin, that 
Russia is a power which has existed, though 
with great vicissitudes of fortune, for a thou- 
sand years ; that Rurick, its founder, was con- 
temporary with Alfred ; and that it assailed 
the Bosphorus and Constantinople in the ninth 
century, with a force greater than that with 
which William the Conqueror subverted the 
Saxon monarchy at Hastings, and more pow- 
erful than were led against it in after times by 
the ambition of Catherine or the generals of 
Nicholas ! What is still more remarkable, the 
mode of attack adopted by these rude invaders 
of the Byzantine empire was precisely that 
which long and dear-bought experience, aided 
by military science, subsequently taught to the 
Russian generals. Avoiding the waterless and 
unhealthy plains of Bessarabia and Walachia, 
they committed themselves in fearful multi- 
tudes to boats, which were wafted down the 
stream of the Dnieper to the Black Sea; and 
when the future conqueror of the east ap- 
proaches to place the cross on the minarets 
of St. Sophia, he has only to follow the track 
of the canoes, which a thousand years ago 
brought the hordes of Rurick to the entrance 
of the Bosphorus. 

Complicated, and to appearance inextricable 
is the transactions of the Slavonic race seem 



at first sight, the history of Russia is yet 
singularly susceptible of simplification. It 
embraces four great periods, each of which 
have stamped their own peculiar impress upon 
the character of the people, and which have 
combined to produce that mighty empire which 
now numbers 60,000,000 of men among its 
subjects, and a seventh of the surface of the 
globe beneath its dominion. 

The first of these periods is that which com- 
mences with the foundation of the Russian 
empire by Rurick, in 862, and terminates with 
the commencement of the unhappy division 
of the empire into apanages, or provisions for 
younger children, — the source of innumerable 
evils both to the monarchy and its subjects, in 
1054. The extent to which the empire had 
spread, and the power it had acquired before 
this ruinous system of division commenced, 
is extraordinary. In the 10th century, Russia 
was as prominent, comparatively speaking, 
among the powers of Europe, in point of 
territory, population, resources, and achieve- 
ments, as she is at this moment. The con- 
quests of Oleg, of Sviatoslof, and of Vladimir, 
to whom the sceptre of Rurick had descended, 
extended the frontiers of the Russian territory 
from Novogorod and Kieff — its original cradle 
on the banks of the Dnieper — to the Baltic, the 
Dwina, and the Bug, on the west; on the 
south, to the cataracts of the Dnieper and the 
Cimmerian Bosphorus ; in the north, to Arch- 
angel, the White Sea, and Finland; on the 
east, to the Ural Mountains and shores of the 
Caspian. All the territory which now con- 
stitutes the strength of Russia, and has enabled 
it to extend its dominion and influence so far 
over Asia and Europe, was already ranged 
under the sceptre of its monarchs before the 
time of Edward the Confessor. 

The second period comprehends the in- 
numerable intestine wars, and progressive 
decline of the strength and consideration of 
the empire, which resulted from the adoption 
of the fatal system of apanages. This method 
of providing for the younger children of suc- 
cessive monarchs, so natural to parental affec- 
tion, so just with reference to the distribution 
of possessions among successive royal fami- 
lies, so ruinous to the ultimate interests of the 
state, was commenced by the Grand Prince 
Dmitri, in 1054, and afforded too ready a means 
of providing for the succeeding generation of 
princes to be soon abandoned. The effects of 
such a system may without difficulty be con- 
ceived. It reduced a solid compact monarchy 
at once to the distracted state of the Saxon 
heptarchy, and soon introduced into its vitals 
those fierce internal wars which exhaust the 
strength of a nation without either augmenting 
its resources, or adding to its reputation. It is 
justly remarked accordingly, by Karamsin, that 
for the next three hundred years after this fatal 
change in the system of government, Russia 
incessantly declined ; and after having attained, 
at a very early period, the highest pitch of 
power and grandeur, she sunk to such a depth 
of weakness as to be incapable of opposing 
any effectual resistance to a foreign invader. 

The third period of Russian history, and not 
the least in the formation of its national cha- 



KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA. 



301 



racier, commenced with the Tartar invasion, 
and terminated with the final emancipation of 
the Moscovite dominions. In 1224, the first 
intelligence of a strange, uncouth, and savage 
enemy having appeared on the eastern frontier, 
was received at Kieff, then the capital of the 
Muscovite confederacy, for it no longer de- 
served the name of an empire; and two hun- 
dred and fifty years had elapsed before the 
nation was finally emancipated from their 
dreadful yoke. This was accomplished by the 
abilities and perseverance of John III., the 
true restorer, and, in some degree, the second 
founder of the empire, in 1480, in which year 
the last invasion of the Tartar was repulsed, 
and the disgraceful tribute so long paid to the 
great khan was discontinued. During this 
melancholy interval, Russia underwent the last 
atrocities of savage cruelty and barbaric des- 
potism. Moscow, then become the capital, was 
sacked and burnt by the Tartars, in 1387, with 
more devastation than afterwards during the 
invasion of Napoleon ; every province of the 
empire was repeatedly overrun by these ruth- 
less invaders, who, equally incapable of giving 
or receiving quarter, seemed, wherever they 
went, to have declared a war of extermination 
against the human race, which their prodi- 
gious numbers and infernal energy in war gen- 
erally enabled them to carry on with success. 
Nor was their pacific rule, where they had 
thoroughly subjugated a country, less degrad- 
ing than their inroad was frightful and de- 
vastating. Oppression, long continued and 
systematic, constituted their only system of 
government; and the Russians owe to these 
terrible tyrants the use of the knout, and of the 
other cruel punishments, which, from their 
long retention in the empire of the czars, when 
generally disused elsewhere, have so long ex- 
cited the horror of Western Europe. 

The fourth period commences with the aboli- 
tion of the ruinous system of apanages by the 
mingled firmness and cunning, wisdom and 
fortune, of John III., about the year 1480 ; and 
continued till the genius of Peter the Great 
gave the country its great impetus two hun- 
dred years after. This period was a chequered 
one to the fortunes of Moscovy, but, on the 
whole, of general progressive advancement. 
Under Vassili, the successor of John III., 
the Russians made themselves masters of 
Smolensko, and extended their frontiers on the 
east to the Dwina. Under John the Terrible, 
who succeeded him, they carried by assault, 
after a terrible struggle, Kazan, in the south 
of Moscovy, where the Tartars had established 
themselves in a solid manner and formed the 
capital of a powerful state, which had more 
than once inflicted, in conjunction with the 
Lithuanians, the most dreadful wounds on the 
vitals of the empire. Disasters great and re- 
peated still marked this period, as wave after 
wave break on the shore after the fury of the 
tempest has been stilled. Moscow was again 
reduced to ashes during the minority of John 
the Terrible; it was again burnt by the Tar- 
tars ; and a third time, by accident ; the vic- 
torious Poles advanced their standards to its 
gates, and so low were his fortunes reduced, 
that that heroic but bloody monarch had at 



one period serious thoughts of deserting his 
country, and seeking refuge in England from 
his numerous enemies. Yet, Russia, thanks 
to the patriotism of her children and the in- 
domitable firmness of her character, survived 
all these disasters; in the succeeding reign 
her arms were extended across the Ural moun- 
tains over Siberia, though her dominion over 
its immense wilds was for long little more 
than nominal, and a fortress was erected at 
Archangel, which secured to her the command 
of the White Sea. 

The last period commences with the taking 
of Azoph, by Peter the Great, in 1696, which 
first opened to the youthful czar the dominion 
of the Black Sea, and terminates with the pro- 
digious extension of the empire, consequent on 
the defeat of Napoleon's invasion. Europe 
has had too much reason to be acquainted 
with the details of Russian victories during 
this period. Her wars were no longer with 
the Tartars or Lithuanians: she no longer 
fought for life or death with the khan of Sam- 
arcand, the hordes of Bati, or the czar of Ka- 
zan. Emerging with the strength of a giant 
from the obscure cloud in which she had 
hitherto been involved, she took an active, and 
at length a fearful part, in the transactions of 
Western Europe. The conquest of Azoph, 
which opened to them the command of the 
Black Sea — the fierce contest with Sweden, 
and ultimate overthrow of its heroic monarch 
at Pultowa— -the bloody wars with Turkey, 
commencing with the disasters of the Pruth, 
and leading on to the triumphs of Ockzakow, 
of Ismael, and Adrianople— the conquest of 
Georgia, and passage of the Russian arms 
over the coast of the Caucasus and to the 
waters of the Araser — the acquisition of Wal- 
achia and Moldavia, and extension of their 
southern frontier to the Danube— the partition 
of Poland, and entire subjugation of their old 
enemies, the Lithuanians — the seizure of Fin- 
land by Alexander— in fine, the overthrow of 
Napoleon, capture of Paris, and virtual sub- 
jugation of Turkey by the treaty of Adrianople, 
have marked this period in indelible charac- 
ters on the tablets of the world's history. 
Above Alexander's tomb are now hung the 
keys of Paris and Adrianople : those of War- 
saw will be suspended over that of his suc- 
cessor ! The ancient and long dreaded rivals 
of the empire, the Tartars, the Poles, the 
French, and the Turks, have been successive- 
ly vanquished. Every war for two centuries 
past has led to an accession to the Moscovite 
territory ; and no human foresight can predict 
the period when the god Terminus is to recede. 
There is enough here to arrest the attention 
of the most inconsiderate; to occupy the 
thoughts of the most contemplative. 

History exhibits numerous instances of 
empires which have been suddenly elevated 
to greatness by the genius or fortune of a 
single man ; but in all such cases the dominion 
hasbeen as short-lived in its endurance as it 
was rapid in its growth. The successive em- 
pires of Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamer- 
lane, Nadir Shah, Charlemagne, and Napo- 
leon, attest this truth. But there is no example 
of a nation having risen to durable greatness 
2C 



302 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



or attained a lasting dominion over the bodies 
and minds of men, but by long previous efforts, 
and the struggles and sufferings of many suc- 
cessive centuries. It would appear to be a 
general law of nature, alike in the material and 
the moral world, that nothing permanent is 
erected but by slow degrees, and that hardship 
and suffering constitute the severe but neces- 
sary school of ultimate greatness. In this 
point of view, there is a remarkable analogy 
between the history, from the earliest periods, 
of England, France, and Russia, — the three 
powers which stood forth so prominent in the 
great fight of the 19th century. Their periods 
of greatness, of suffering, and of probation, 
from their infancy have been the same ; and 
during the long training of a thousand years, 
each has at the same time, and in a similar 
manner, been undergoing the moral discipline 
requisite for ultimate greatness, and the effects 
of which now appear in the lasting impression 
they have made upon the world. We do not 
recollect to have ever seen this remarkable 
analogy in the annals of three first-born of 
European states ; but it is so striking, that we 
must request our reader's attention for a few 
minutes to its consideration. 

The Russian empire, as already mentioned, 
was founded by Rurick, a hero and a wise 
monarch, about the year 860 ; and ere long its 
forces were so powerful, that eighty thousand 
Russians attacked the Bosphorus, and threaten- 
ed Constantinople in a more serious manner 
than it has since been, even by the victorious 
arms of Catherine or Nicholas. This first and 
great era in Russian story — this sudden burst 
into existence, was contemporary with that of 
Alfred in England, who began to reign in 871, 
and nearly so with Charlemagne in France, 
who died at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 814, leaving 
an empire co-extensive with that which was j 
exactly a thousand years afterwards lost by | 
Napoleon. 

The two centuries and a half of weakness, 
civil dissension, and external decline, which in 
Russia commenced with the system of divid- 
ing the empire into apanages in 10G0, were 
contemporary with a similar period of distrac- 
tion and debility, both to the English and 
French monarchies. To the former by the 
Norman conquests, which took place in that 
very year, and was followed by continual op- 
pression of the people, and domestic warfare 
among the barons, till they were repressed by 
the firm hand of Edward' I., who first rallied 
the native English population to the support 
of the crown, and by his vigour and abilities 
overawed the Norman nobility in the end of 
the 13th century. To the latter, by the mise- 
rable weakness which overtook the empire of 
Charlemagne under the rule of his degenerate 
successor; until at length its frontiers were 
contracted from the Elbe and the Pyrenees to 
the Aisne and the Loire, — till all the great 
feudatories in the monarchy had become inde- 
pendent princes, and the decrees of the king 
of France were not obeyed farther than twenty 
miles around Paris. 

The woful period of Moscovite oppression, 
when ravaged by the successful armies of 
Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Bati, and 



when the people for two centuries drank the 
cup of humiliation from Tartar conquests, or 
purchased a precarious respite by the igno- 
miny of Tartar tribute, was contemporary with 
the disastrous English wars in France. The 
battle of Cressy was fought in 1314; that of 
Azincour in 1415; and it was net till 1448, 
that these hated invaders were at length 
finally expelled from the Gallic shores, by the 
effects of the heroism of the Maid of Orleans, 
and the jealousies of the English nobility in 
the time of Henry VI. If these wars were dis- 
astrous to France, — if they induced the hor- 
rors of famine, pestilence, and Jacquerie, 
which ere long reduced its inhabitants a-half, 
— not less ruinous were their consequences to 
England, exhausting, as they did, the strength 
of the monarchy in unprofitable foreign wars, 
and leaving the nation a prey, at their termi- 
nation, to the furious civil contests of York 
and Lancaster, which for above twenty years 
drenched their fields with blood, almost de- 
stroyed the old nobility, and left the -weak and 
disjointed people an easy prey to the tyrannic 
rule of Henry VIII., who put 72,000 persons to 
death by the hand of the executioner in his 
single reign. It is hard to say whether Rus- 
sia, when emerging from the severities of 
Tartar bondage — or France, when freed from 
the scourge of English invasions — or England, 
when decimated by the frightful carnage of 
York and Lancaster, were in the more deplor- 
able condition. 

From this pitiable state of weakness and 
suffering all the three monarchies were raised 
about the same period by three monarchs, who 
succeeded in each, partly by wisdom, partly 
by good fortune, partly by fraud, in re-con- 
structing the disjointed members of the state, 
and giving to the central government the 
vigour and unity which had been lost amidst 
the distractions and sufferings of former times, 
but was essential to the tranquillity and well- 
being of society. John III., who achieved this 
great work in Russia, was the counterpart of 
Louis XL, who at the same time accomplished 
it in France. John III. ascended the throne in 
1462, and reigned till 1505. Louis XI. in 1461, 
and reigned till 1483. Both were cautious in 
design, and persevering in execution; both 
were bold in council rather than daring in the 
field ; both prevailed in a barbarous age, rather 
by their superior cunning and dissimulation 
than the wisdom or justice of their measures. 
Both had implicitly adopted the Machiavelian 
maxim, that the end will in all cases justify 
the means, and employed without scruple fraud 
and perfidy, as well as wisdom and persever- 
ance to accomplish their grand object, the re- 
storation of the throne, and abasement of the 
great feudatories. Both were equally success- 
ful. The reunion of the apanages to the crown 
of the Russian Grand Prince, the subjugation 
of the ancient republic of Novogorod, the an- 
nexation of that of Pfosk by his successors, 
were steps extremely analogous to the defeat 
of Charles the Bold, and the acquisition of 
Normandy and Acquitaine by Louis XL, and 
the happy marriage of Anne of Britanny to his 
royal successor. Nor was the coincidence of 
a similar monarch on the throne, and a similar 



KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA. 



303 



revolution in society in England at the same 
period, less remarkable. Henry VII. won the 
crown of England on the field of Bosworth in 
1483, and reigned till 1509. By uniting the 
rival pretensions of the Houses of York and 
Lancaster to the throne, through his marriage 
with the heiress of the former house, he re- 
constructed the English monarchy ; his avarice 
left a vast treasure which rendered the crown 
independent to his vehement successor ; his 
cautious policy broke down (he little power 
which the fierce contests of former times had 
left to the Norman nobility. John III., Louis 
XL, and Henry VII. were the real restorers of 
the monarchy in their respective Kingdoms of 
Russia, France, and England; and they were 
men of the same character, and flourished ver}' 
nearly at the same time. 

The next epoch in the history of Russia was 
that of Peter the Great, whose genius overcame 
the obstacles consequent on the remoteness of 
its situation, and opened to its people the ca- 
reer of European industry, arts, and arms. 
Russia had now gone through the ordeal of 
greatness and of suffering; it had come pow- 
erful, energetic, and valiant, out of the school 
of suffering. But the remoteness of its situa- 
tion, the want of water communication with its 
principal provinces, the barbarous Turks who 
held the key to its richest realms in the south, 
and the Frozen Ocean, which for half the year 
barricaded its harbours in the north, had 
hitherto prevented the industry and civilization 
of its inhabitants from keeping pace with their 
martial prowess and great aspirations. At 
this period Peter arose, who, uniting the wis- 
dom of a philosopher and the genius of a law- 
giver, to the zeal of an enthusiast and the fero- 
city of a despot, forcibly drove his subjects in- 
to the new career, and forced them, in spite of 
themselves, to engage in the arts and labours 
of peace. Contemporary with this vast heave 
of the Moscovite empire, was a similar growth 
of the power and energy of France and Eng- 
land ; but the different characters of the Asiatic 
and European monarchy and of the free com- 
munity, were now conspicuous. The age of 
Peter the Great, in Russia, was that of Louis 
XIV. in France; of the Revolution of 1688, 
and of Marlborough, in England. The same 
age saw the victories of Pultowa and Blen- 
heim ; the overthrow of Charles XII. and hum- 
bling of the Grand Monarque. But great was 
now the difference in the character of the na- 
tions by whom these achievements were effect- 
ed. Peter, by the force of Asiatic power, drove 
an ignorant and brutish race into industry and 
art; Louis led a chivalrous and gallant nation 
to the highest pitch of splendour and great- 
ness ; William III. was impelled by the free 
spirit of an energetic and religious community, 
into the assertion of Protestant independence, 
and the maintenance of European freedom. 
But this sreat step in all the three nations took 
place at the same time, and under sovereigns 
severally adapted to the people they were 
called to rule, and the part they were destined 
to play on the theatre of the world. 

The last great step in the history of Russia 
has been that of Alexander — an era signalized 
beyond all others by the splendour and magni- 



tude of military success. It witnessed the con- 
quest of Finland and Georgia, of Walachia, 
Moldavia, the acquisition of Poland, and the 
extension of the empire to the Araxes. Need 
we say with what events this period was con- 
temporary in France and England'? — that the 
age which witnessed the burning of Moscow, 
saw also the taking of Paris — that Pitt and 
Wellington were contemporary with Alexan- 
der and Barclay — that but a year separated 
Leipsic and Waterloo 1 Coming, as it did, at 
the close of this long period of parallel ad- 
vance and similar vicissitudes, during a thou- 
sand years, there is something inexpressibly 
impressive in this contemporaneous rise of the 
three great powers of Europe to the highest 
pinnacle of worldly grandeur — this simulta- 
neous efflorescence of empires, which during 
so long a period had advanced parallel to each 
other in the painful approach to worldly great- 
ness. Nor let the intellectual pride of western 
Europe despise the simple and comparatively 
untutored race, which has only within the last 
century and a half taken a prominent part in 
the affairs of Europe. The virtues, whether of 
nations or individuals, are not the least im- 
portant which are nursed in solitude ; the cha- 
racter not the least commanding, which, chas- 
tened by suffering, is based on a sense of reli- 
gious duty. The nation is not to be despised 
which overthrew Napoleon ; the moral train- 
ing not forgotten which fired the torches of 
Moscow. European liberalism and infidelity 
will acquire a right to ridicule Moscovite igno- 
rance and barbarity, when it has produced 
equal achievements, but not till then. 

All the recent events in history, as well as 
the tendency of opinion in all the enlightened 
men in all countries who have been bred up 
under their influence, point to the conclusion 
that there is an original and indelible differ- 
ence in the character of the different races of 
men, and that each will best find its highest 
point of social advancement by institutions 
which have grown out of its ruling disposi- 
tions. This is but an exemplification of the 
profound observation long ago made by Mon- 
tesquieu, that no nation ever rose to durable 
greatness but by institutions in harmony with 
its spirit. Perhaps no national calamities 
have been so great, because none so lasting 
and irremediable, as those which have arisen 
from the attempt to transfer the institutions of 
our race and stage of political advancement 
to another family of men and another era of 
social progress. Recollecting what great things 
the Slavonic race has done both in former and 
present times, it is curious to see the character 
which Karamsin gives of them in the first vo- 
lume of his great work : — 

"Like all other people the Slavonians, at 
the commencement of their political exist- 
ence, were ignorant of the advantages of a re 
gular government; they would neither tolerate 
masters nor slaves among them, holding the 
fruit of blessings to consist in the enjoyment 
of unbounded freedom. The father of a family 
commanded his children, the husband his wife, 
the master his household, the brother his sis- 
ters; every one constructed his hut in a place 
apart from the rest, in order that he might live 



•304 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



more at ease, and according to his own incli- 
nations. A wood, a stream, a field, constituted 
the dominion of a Slavonian; and no unarmed 
person ventured to violate the sanctity of his 
domain — each family formed a little independ- 
ent republic ; and the ancient customs, com- 
mon to the whole nation, served them instead 
of laws. On important occasions the different 
tribes assembled to deliberate on their common 
concerns ; they consulted the old men, those 
living repositories of ancient usages, and they 
evinced the utmost deference to their advice. 
The same system was adopted when they re- 
quired to elect a chief for one of their warlike 
expeditions ; but such was their excessive love 
of freedom, and repugnance towards any kind 
of constraint, that they imposed various limi- 
tations on the authority of their chiefs, whom 
they often disobeyed, even in the heat of bat- 
tle : after having terminated their expedition, 
every one returned to his home, and resumed 
the command of his children and household. 

" That savage simplicity — that rudeness of 
manners could not long endure. The pillage 
of the empire of the east, the centre of luxury 
and riches, made the Slavonians acquainted 
with new pleasures and hitherto unfelt wants. 
These wants, by putting an end to their soli- 
tary independence, drew closer the bonds of 
social dependence: they daily felt more 
strongly the necessity of mutual support; 
Ihey placed their homes nearer each other; 
they began to build towns. Others, who had 
seen in foreign countries magnificent cities 
and flourishing villages, lost all taste for the 
obscurity of the forests, once endeared to their 
•hearts by the love of independence ; they 
passed into the provinces of Greece ; they 
consented to range themselves under the rule 
of the emperor. The fate of war placed, for a 
brief season, a large part of the German Sla- 
vonians under the government of Charlemagne 
and his successors ; but an unconquerable 
love of freedom was ever the basis of their 
character. On the first favourable opportunity 
they threw off the yoke, and avenged them- 
selves cruelly on their rulers for their transient 
subjection: they were never finally reduced 
to order but by the influences of the Christian 
religion." — Vol. i. p. 68, 69. 

How strongly does this picture of the Sla- 
vonic race, a thousand years ago, recall the 
traces of the Poles of the present time ! The 
same love of solitary and isolated freedom, — 
the same passion for independence, — the same 
fretting under the restraints of civilization and 
the curb of authority, — the source at once of 
their strength and their weakness — their glo- 
ries and their ruin ! 

If it be true, as Shakspeare has told us. that 
the ruling passion is strong in death; no slight 
interest will attach to Karamsin's graphic pic- 
ture of the character evinced in the supreme 
hour by the three races which have so long 
contended for the mastery of the east, viz., the 
Tartars, the Russians or Slavonians, and the 
Turks. 

" Cannons for a long time were not regarded 
oy the Russians as a necessary part of the 
implements of war. Invented as they con- 
ceived by the Italian artists for the defence of 



fortresses, they allowed them to remain mo- 
tionless on their carriages on the ramparts of 
the Kremlin. In the moment of combat the 
Russians trusted more to their number than to 
the skill of their manoeuvres; they endea- 
voured in general to attack the enemy in rear, 
and surround him. Like all Asiatic nations, 
they looked rather to their movements at a 
distance than in close fight ; but when they did 
charge, their attacks were impetuous and ter- 
rible, but of short duration. 'In their vehe- 
ment shock,' says Herberstain, ' they seemed 
to say to their enemy, — Fly, or we will fly our- 
selves !' In war as in pacific life, the people 
of different races differ to an astonishing de- 
gree from each other. Thrown down from his 
horse, disarmed, and covered with blood, the 
Tartar never thinks of surrender: he shakes 
his arms, repels the enemy with his foot, and 
with dying fury bites him. No sooner is the 
Turk sensible he is overthrown, than he throws 
aside his scimitar, and implores the gene- 
rosity of his conqueror. Pursue a Russian, 
he makes no attempt to defend himself in his 
flight, but never does he ask for quarter. Is 
he pierced by lances or swords, he is silent, and 
dies" — Vol. vii. p. 252. 

These are the men of whom Frederick the 
Great said, you might kill them where they 
stood, but never make them fly. — "They were 
motionless, fell, and died!" 

"Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the brave." 

A devout sense of religion, a warm and con- 
stant sense of Divine superintendence, has in 
every age, from the days of Rurick to those 
of Alexander, formed the ruling principle and 
grand characteristic of the Russians, and has 
of all nations which have ever risen to durable 
greatness. Karamsin tells us that from the 
remotest period this has been the unvarying 
characteristic of the Slavonic race: — 

" In the 6th century, the Slavonians adored 
the Creator of Thunder, — the God of the uni- 
verse. The majestic spectacle of storms, — at 
the moment when an invisible hand appears 
from the height of the burning heavens to 
dart its lightnings upon the earth, — must ever 
make a deep impression alike on civilized 
and savage man. The Slavonians and Antes, 
as Procopius observes, did not believe in des- 
tiny; but, according to them, all events depend- 
ed on the it-ill of a Ruler of the world. On the 
field of battle, in the midst of perils, in sick- 
ness, in calamity, they sought to bind the Su- 
preme Being, — by vows, by the sacrifice of 
bulls and goats, to appease his wrath. On the 
same principle, they adored the rivers and 
mountains, whom they peopled with nymphs 
and genii, by whose aid they sought to pene- 
trate the depths of futurity. In later times, 
the Slavonians had abundance of idols ; per- 
suaded that true wisdom consisted in knowing 
the name and qualities of each god, in order to 
be able to propitiate his favour. They were 
true polytheists, considering their statues not 
as images of the gods, but as inspired by their 
spirit, and wielding their power. 

"Nevertheless, in the midst of these absurd 
superstitions, the Slavonians had an idea of a 
supreme and all-powerful Being, to whom the 



KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA. 



305 



immensity of the heavens, dazzling with thou- 
sands of stars, formed a worthy temple ; but 
who was occupied only with celestial objects, 
while he had intrusted to subaltern deities, or 
to his children, the government of the world. 
They called him ' Bilibos,' or ' the White God,' 
while the spirit of evil was named 'Teherm- 
bog,' or ' the Black God.' They sought to ap- 
pease the lash by sacrifices: he was represented 
under the image of a lion ; and to his malig- 
nant influences they ascribed all their misfor- 
tunes and miseries of life. The beneficent 
Deity they considered too elevated to be 
swayed by prayers, or approached by mortals : 
it was the inferior executors of his will who 
alone were to be propitiated." — Vol. i. p. 99 — 
102. 

It has been already mentioned, that the Rus- 
sian empire was founded by Rurick, in 862. 
And it is very remarkable that supreme power 
was obtained by that great warrior, not by the 
sword of conquest, but by the voluntary and 
unanimous will of the people. 

" In Russia," says Karamsin, " sovereign 
power was established with the unanimous 
consent of the inhabitants ; and the Slavonic 
tribes concurred in forming an empire which 
has for its limits now the Danube, America, 
Sweden and China. The origin of the govern- 
ment was as follows : — the Slavonians of No- 
vogorod and the central districts around Mos- 
cow, sent an embassy to the Varegue-Russians, 
who were established on the other side of the 
Baltic, with these words — ' Our country is 
great and fertile, but under the rule of disor- 
der : come and take it.' Three brothers named 
Rurick, Sincori, and Trouver, illustrious alike 
by their birth and their great actions, escorted 
oy a numerous body of Slavonians, accepted 
the perilous invitation, and fixed their abode, 
and began to assume the government in Rus- 
sia, — Rurick at Novogorod, Sincori at Bich 
Ozero, near the Fins, and Trouver at Izborsk. 
Within less than two years, Sincori and 
Trouver both died, and Rurick obtained the 
government of the whole provinces which 
had invited them over; and which embraced 
all the central provinces of Russia; and the 
feudal system was established over their whole 
extent." — Vol. i. p. 143, 144. 

The Dnieper was the great artery of this 
infant dominion ; at once their watery high 
road, and no inconsiderable source of subsist- 
ence. It was on its bosom that the innumera- 
ble canoes were launched, which, filled with 
yellow-haired and ferocious warriors, descend- 
ed to the Sea of Azoph, penetrated into the 
Black Sea, forced the passage of the Bospho- 
rus, and often besieged Constantinople itself. 
In less than a century after its first origin, the 
Russian empire was already a preponderating 
power in the east of Europe. Before the year 
950 the conquests of Oleg, Sviatoslof, and Vla- 
dimir, the successors of Rurick, had advanced 
its frontiers, on the west, to the Baltic, the 
Dwina, the Bug, and the Carpathian moun- 
tains; on the south, to the cataracts of the 
Dnieper, and the Cimmerian Bosphorus ; on 
the east and north to Finland and the Ural 
mountains, and on the south-east nearly to the 
Caspian Sea ; corresponding nearly to the 
39 



boundaries of Russia in Europe at this time. 
The words of the Novogorodians, their allies, 
which the old annalist of Russia, Nestor, has 
transmitted, expressed the principle of the go- 
vernment of this vast empire, at this early pe- 
riod: "We wish a prince who will command 
and govern us according to the laws ;" that is 
to say, as a limited monarchy. 

Kieff was for centuries the capital of this 
rising dominion, its situation on the bank of 
the Dnieper being singularly favourable for 
the development of the resources of the em- 
pire. Of its strength and formidable charac- 
ter from the earliest times, decisive evidence 
is afforded by the three great expeditions which 
they fitted out against Constantinople, and 
which are recorded alike by the Greek and 
early religious annalists. Of the first of these, 
in 905, Karamsin has given us the following 
animated account: — 

"In 905, Oleg, in order to find employment 
for his restless and rapacious subjects, de- 
clared war against the empire. No sooner 
was this determination known, than all the 
warlike tribes from the shores of Finland to 
those of the Vistula, crowded to the Dniester, 
and were ranged under the standard of Oleg. 
Speedily the Dniester was covered by 2,000 
light barks, each of which carried forty com- 
batants. Thus 80,000 armed men descended 
the river, flushed with victory, and eager for 
the spoils of the imperial city. The cavalry 
marched along the banks, and soon the mighty 
host approached the cataracts of the Dnieper, 
which were of a much more formidable cha- 
racter than they are now, when so many sub- 
sequent centuries, and no small efforts of 
human industry, have been at work in clearing 
away the obstacles of the navigation. The 
Varagues of Kieff had first ventured with two 
hundred barks to enter into the perilous ra- 
pids, and through pointed rocks, and amidst 
foaming whirlpools, had safely reached the 
bottom. On this occasion Oleg passed with a 
fleet and army ten times as numerous. The 
Russians threw themselves into the water, 
and conducted the barks by the strength of 
the swimmers down the rapids. In many 
places they were obliged to clamber up on the 
banks, and seeking a precarious footing on 
the sharp ridges of rocks and precipices, often 
bore the barks aloft on their shoulders. After 
incredible efforts they reached the mouth of 
the river, where they repaired their masts, 
sails, and rudders ; and boldly putting to sea, 
which most of them had never seen before, 
spread forth on the unknown waters of the 
Euxine. The cavalry marched by land, and 
though grievously weakened in number by 
the extraordinary length of the land journey, 
joined their fleet at the mouth of the Bospho- 
rus ; and the united force, 60,000 strong, aj. 
proached Constantinople. 

" Leon, surnamed the philosopher, reigned 
there ; and incapable of any warlike effort he 
contented himself with closing the mouth of 
the Golden Horn, or harbour of Constanti- 
nople ; and secure behind its formidable ram- 
parts, beheld with indifference the villages 
around in flames, their churches pillaged and 
destroyed, and the wretched inhabitants driven 
2c2 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



by the swords and lances of the Russians into 
the capital. Nestor, the Russian annalist, has 
left the most frightful account of the cruel bar- 
barities committed on these defenceless in- 
habitants by the victorious warriors, who put 
their prisoners to death by the crudest tortures, 
and hurled the living promiscuously with the 
dead into the sea. Meanwhile the Greeks, 
albeit numerous and admirably armed, re- 
mained shut up in Constantinople; but soon 
the Russian standards approached the walls, 
and they began to tremble behind their im- 
pregnable ramparts. Oleg drew up his boats 
on the shore, and putting them, as at the cata- 
racts of the Dnieper, on the shoulders of his 
men, reached the harbour on the land side ; 
and after launching them on its upper extremi- 
ty, appeared with spreading sails, as Mahomet 
II. afterwards did, ready to land his troops 
behind the chain, and escalade the walls, on 
the side where they were weakest. Terrified 
at this audacious enterprise, the Emperor 
Leon hastened to sue for peace, offering to 
send provisions and equipments for the fleet, 
and to pay an annual tribute ; and a treaty was 
at length concluded, on the condition that each 
Russian in the armament should receive 
twelve grionas, and heavy contributions should 
be levied on the empire for the towns of Kieff, 
Tchernigof, Polteck, Lubetch, and other de- 
pendencies of Russia." — Vol. i. p. 162 — 165. 

When the imperial city in the commence- 
ment of the 10th century was assailed by such 
formidable bodies of these northern invaders, 
and its emperors were so little in a condition 
to resist the attack, it is not surprising that it 
should have been prophesied in that city 900 
years ago, that in its last days Constantinople 
should be taken by the Russians. The sur- 
prising thing rather is, that in consequence of 
the lateral irruption of the Turks, and the sub- 
sequent jealousies of other European powers, 
this consummation should have been so long 
delayed as it actually has. 

Passing by the two centuries and a half of 
weakness, civil warfare, and decline, which 
followed the disastrous system of apanages, 
which are uninteresting to general history, we 
hasten to lay before our readers a specimen 
of the description Karamsin has given of the 
terrible effects produced by the Tartar inva- 
sions, which commenced in 1223. The de- 
rastation of that flourishing part of Asia which 
formerly bore the name of Bactriana and 
Sogdiana, is thus described : — 

" Bokhara in vain attempted a defence 
against Genghis Khan. The elders of the town 
came out to leave the keys of the city at the 
feet of the conqueror, but to no purpose. 
Genghis Khan appeared on horseback, and 
entered the principal mosque ; no sooner did 
he see the Alcoran there, than he seized it, and 
threw it with fury to the ground. That capital 
was reduced to ashes. Samarcand, fortified 
with care, contained 100,000 soldiers, and a 
great number of elephants, which constituted 
at that period the principal strength of the 
Asiatic armies. Distrusting even these power- 
ful means of defence, the inhabitants threw 
themselves on the mercy of the conqueror, but 
tret with a fate as cruel as if they had stood 



an assault. Thirty thousand were put to death 
in cold blood, a like number condemned to 
perpetual slavery, and a contribution of 200,000 
pieces of gold levied on the town. Khiva 
Tirmel, and Balkh, in the last of which were 
1200 mosques, and 200 baths for strangers 
alone, experienced the same fate. During two 
or three years the ferocious wars of Genghis 
Khan ravaged to such a degree the wide coun- 
tries stretching from the sea of Aral to the 
Indus, that during the six centuries which 
have since elapsed, they have never recovered 
their former flourishing condition." — Vol. iii. 
p. 281, 282. 

At length this terrible tempest approached 
the Moscovite plains. The first great battle 
between the Moguls and the Russians took 
place in 1226. 

"Encouraged by a trifling success they had 
gained over the advanced guard of the enemy, 
the Russians drew up their army on the left 
bank of the Kalka, and calmly awaited the ap- 
proach of the enemy. Soon the innumerable 
squadrons of the Tartars appeared, and the in- 
trepid Daniel, overflowing with courage, bore 
down upon the vanguard, broke it, and had 
well-nigh gained a glorious victory ; but the 
cowardly Polontsks could not stand the shock 
of the Moguls, and speedily turned their backs 
and fled. In the delirium of terror, they pre- 
cipitated themselves on the Russians, penetra- 
ted their ranks, and carried the most frightful 
disorder into their camp, where the princes of 
Kieff and Tchernigof had made no prepara- 
tions for battle, as Moteslaf, their general, who 
commanded the leading column, wishing to 
engross the whole honours of victory, had 
given them no warning of the approaching 
fight. Once broken, the Russians made but a 
feeble resistance; even the young Daniel was 
swept away by the torrent, and it was not till 
his horse stopped on the brink of a stream 
which it could not pass, that he felt a deep 
wound which he had received in the com- 
mencement of the action. The Tartars, in 
continuing the pursuit to the banks of the 
Dnieper, made a prodigious slaughter of the 
flying Muscovites; among others, six princes 
and seventy nobles were put to death. Never 
did Russia experience a more stunning ca- 
lamity. A superb army, numerous, valiant, 
animated with the highest spirit, almost en- 
tirely disappeared; hardly a tenth part of its 
numbers escaped. The base Polontsks, our 
pretended allies, joined in the massacre of the 
Russians, when victory had decidedly declared 
in favour of the Moguls. In the consternation 
which followed, the few Russian generals 
who survived threw themselves into the 
Dnieper, and destroyed all the boats on the 
river, to prevent the enemy from following 
after them. All but Moteslaf Romanevich, of 
Kieff, passed over: but that chief, who was 
left in a fortified camp on the summit of a hill, 
disdained to abandon his post, and actually 
awaited the whole fury of the Mogul onset. 
During three days, at the head of his heroic 
band, he repulsed all their efforts, and at length 
wearied with a resistance which they saw no 
means of surmounting, the Mogul leaders pro- 
posed to allow him to retire with his troops, 



KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA. 



307 



provided a ransom was agreed to, which ca- 
pitulation was agreed to and sworn on hoth 
sides. No sooner, however, had the perfidious 
Tartars by this device wiled the Russians out 
of their stronghold, than they fell upon them 
and massacred the whole, and concluded their 
triumph, by making a horrid feast of their 
bloody remains." — Vol. iii. p. 289 — 291. 

The immediate subjugation of Russia seemed 
presaged by this dreadful defeat; but the dan- 
ger at the moment was averted by orders from 
Genghis Khan, who withdrew his forces to the 
south for an expedition against Persia. But 
the breathing-time was not of long duration. 
Before many years had elapsed, the Tartars 
returned flushed with fresh conquest under the 
redoubtable Bati. That terrible conqueror, 
the scourge of Russia, took and burnt Moscow, 
where the prince, who commanded, and the 
whole of the inhabitants, were put to the 
sword, without distinction of age or sex. City 
after city, province after province, fell before 
the dreadful invaders, who seemed as irresisti- 
ble as they were savage and pitiless. Broken 
down into numerous little apanages, or separate 
principalities, the once powerful Russian em- 
pire was incapable of making any effectual 
resistance. Yet were examples not wanting 
of the most heroic and touching devotion, 
worthy to be placed beside the names of Asta- 
pa and Numantium. 

" Bati sent a part of his troops against Souz- 
del, which made no resistance. As soon as 
they had entered it, the Tartars, according to 
their usual custom, put to death the whole 
population, with the exception of the young 
monks at Nuni, who were reserved for sla- 
very. On the 6th of February, 1238, the in- 
habitants of Vladimir beheld the dark squad- 
rons of the Tartars, like a black torrent, sur- 
round their walls; and soon the preparation 
of scaling ladders and palisades indicated an 
immediate assault. Unable to resist this in- 
numerable army, and yet sensible that it was 
in vain, as the Moguls would massacre, or sell 
them all for slaves, the boyards, and nobles, 
inspired with a sublime spirit, resolved to die 
as became them. The most heart-rending 
spectacle followed. Vsevold, his wife and 
children, and a great number of illustrious 
nobles assembled in the church of Notre Dame, 
where they supplicated the Bishop Metrophene, 
to give them the ' tonsure monacale,' which se- 
vered them from the world. That solemnity 
took place in profound silence. Those heroic 
citizens had bid adieu to the world and to life; 
but at the moment of quitting it, they did not 
pray the less fervently for the existence of 
their beloved Russia. On the 7th of February, 
being the Sunday of the Carnival, the assault 
commenced, — the Tartars broke into the city 
by the Golden Gate, by that of Brass and that 
of Saint Irene. Vsevold and Moteslaf retired 
with their guards into the old town, while 
Agatha, the wife of Georges, the general-in- 
chief, his daughters, nieces, grand-daughters, 
and a crowd of citizens of the highest rank, 
flocked to the cathedral, where they were soon 
surrounded by the ferocious Moguls, who set 
fire to the building. No sooner did he per- 
ceive the flames, than the bishop exclaimed, 



'Oh, Lord! stretch out your invisible arms, 
and receive your servants in peace,' and gave 
his benediction to all around him. In fervent 
devotion they fell on their faces, awaiting death, 
which speedily overtook them. Some were 
suffocated by the volumes of smoke which 
rushed in on all sides, others perished in the 
flames or sank beneath the sword of the Tar- 
tars. The blood-thirstiness of the Moguls 
could not await the advance of the conflagra- 
tion ; with hatchets they burst open the gates and 
rushed in, eager for the treasures which they 
thought were hid in the interior. The cruel 
warriors of Bati made scarce any prisoners : 
all perished by the sword or the flames. The 
Prince Vsevold and Moteslaf, finding them- 
selves unable to repel the enemy, strove to 
cut their way through their dense battalions, 
and both perished in the attempt." — Vol. iii. p. 
344, 345. 

Another instance of sublime devotion will 
close our extracts from the scenes of car- 
nage : — 

"After the destruction of Vladimir, the nu- 
merous Tartar bands advanced towards Ko- 
zilsk, in the government of Kalonga. Vassili 
commanded in that town, and with his guards 
and his people deliberated on the part which 
they should adopt. 'Our prince is still young,' 
exclaimed those faithful Russians: 'It is our 
duty to die for him, in order to leave a glorious 
name, and to find beyond the tomb the crown 
of immortality.' All united in this generous 
determination, resolving at the same time to 
retard the enemy as much as possible by the 
most heroic resistance. During more than a 
month the Tartars besieged the fortress with- 
out being able to make any sensible progress 
in its reduction. At length a part of the walls, 
having fallen down, under their strokes, the 
Tartars escaladed the ramparts ; but at their 
summit, they were met by a determined band 
of Russians, who with knives and swords, dis- 
puted every inch of ground, and slew 4,000 
Tartars before they sank under the innumer- 
able multitude of their enemies. Not one of 
that heroic band survived ; the whole inhabit- 
ants, men, women, and children, were put to 
death, and Bati, astonished at so vehement a 
resistance, called the town, ' the wicked city ;' 
a glorious appellation when coming from 
a Tartar chief. Vassili perished, literally 
drowned in the blood of his followers." — Vol. 
iii. p. 549, 550. 

And it is at the time when these heroic 
deeds are for the first time brought under the 
notice of the people of this country, that we 
are told that every thing is worn out, and that 
nothing new or interesting is to be found in 
human affairs. 

But all these efforts, how heroic soever, 
could not avert the stroke of fate. Russia was 
subdued — less by the superior skill or valour, 
than the enormous numbers of the enemy, who 
at length poured into the country 400,000 
strong. For above two hundred and fifty years 
they were tributary to the Tartars, and the 
grand princes of Russia were confirmed in 
their government by the Great Khan. The 
first great effort to shake off that odious yoke, 
was made in 1378, when Dmitri collected the still 



308 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



scattered forces of the apanages to make head 
against the common enemy. The two armies, 
each 150,000 strong, met at KoulikofT, on the 
7th September, 1378, on which day, four hun- 
dred and thirty-four years afterwards, Napoleon 
and Kutasoff commenced the dreadful strug- 
gle at Borodino. 

" On the 6th September, the army approached 
the Don, and the princes and boyards delib- 
erated whether they should retire across the 
river, so as to place it between them and the 
enemy, or await them where they stood, in 
order to cut off all retreat from the cowardly, 
and compel them to conquer or die. Dmitri 
then ascended a mound, from which he could 
survey his vast army. 'The hour of God,' 
said he, 'has sounded.' In truth no one could 
contemplate that prodigious multitude of men 
and horses; those innumerable battalions 
ranged in the finest order; the thousands of 
banners, and tens of thousands of arms glitter- 
ing in the sun, and hear the cry repeated by a 
hundred and fifty thousand voices, — 'Great 
God, give us the victory over our enemies,' 
without having some confidence in the result. 
Such was the emotion of the prince, that his 
eyes filled with tears; and dismounting, he 
knelt down, and stretching out his arm to the 
black standard, on which was represented our 
Saviour's figure, he prayed fervently for the 
salvation of Russia. — Then mounting his horse, 
he said to those around, — ' My well-beloved 
brothers and companions in arms, it is by 
your exploits this day, that you will live in 
the memory of man, or obtain the crown of 
immortality.' 

"Soon the Tartar squadrons were seen 
slowly advancing, and ere long they covered 
the whole country to the eastward, as far as 
the eye could reach. Great as was the host 
of the Russians, they were outnumbered con- 
siderably by the Moguls. His generals be- 
sought Dmitri to retire, alleging the duty of a 
commander-in-chief to direct the movements, 
not hazard his person like a private soldier; 
but he replied, 'No, you will suffer wherever 
you are : if I live, follow me, if I die avenge 
me.' Shortly after the battle commenced, and 
was the most desperate ever fought between 
the Russians and the Tartars. Over an ex- 
tent of ten wersts, (seven miles,) the earth was 
stained with the blood of the Christians and 
Infidels. In some quarters the Russians 
broke the Moguls ; in others they yielded to 
their redoubtable antagonists. In the centre 
some young battalions gave way, and spread 
the cry that all was lost: the enemy rushed in 
at the opening this afforded, and forced their 
way nearly to the standard of the Grand 
Prince, which was only preserved by the de- 
voted heroism of his guard. Meanwhile 
Prince Vladimir Andreiwitch, who was placed 
with a chosen body of troops in ambuscade, 
was furious at being the passive spectator of 
so desperate a conflict in which he was not 
permitted to bear a part. At length, at eight 
at night, the Prince of Volhynia, who observed 
with an experienced eye the movements of the 
two armies, exclaimed, ' My friends, our time 
has come !' and let the whole loose upon the 
enemy, now somewhat disordered by success. 



Instantly they emerged from the forest which 
had concealed them from the enemy, and fell 
with the utmost fury on the Moguls. The 
effect of this unforeseen attack was decisive. 
Astonished at the vehement onset, by troops 
fresh and in the best order, the Tartars fled, 
and their chief, Mamia, who, from an elevated 
spot beheld the rout of his host, exclaimed, 
' The God of the Christian is powerful V and 
joined in the general flight. The Russians 
pursued the Moguls to the Metcha, in endea- 
vouring to cross which vast numbers were 
slain or drowned, and the camp, with an im- 
mense booty, fell into the hands of the vic- 
tors."— Vol. v. pp. 79—82. 

This great victory, however, did not decide 
the contest, and nearly a hundred years 
elapsed before the independence of Russia 
from the Tartars was finally established. Not 
long after this triumph, as after Boradino, 
Moscow was taken and burnt by the Moguls ; 
the account of which must, for the present, 
close our extracts. 

" No sooner were the walls of Moscow es- 
caladed by the Tartars, than the whole inha- 
bitants, men, women, and children, became 
the prey of the cruel conquerors. Knowing 
that great numbers had taken refuge in the 
stone churches, which would not burn, they 
cut down the gates with hatchets, and found 
immense treasures, brought into these asy- 
lums from the adjoining country. Satiated 
with carnage and spoil, the Tartars next set 
fire to the town, and drove a weeping crowd 
of captives, whom they had selected for slaves, 
from the massacre into the fields around. 
' What terms,' say the contemporary annalists, 
' can paint the deplorable state in which Mos- 
cow was then left? That populous capital, 
resplendent with riches and glory, was de- 
stroyed in a single day!' Nothing remained 
but a mass of ruins and ashes ; the earth 
covered with burning remains and drenched 
with blood, corpses half burnt, and churches 
wrapt in flames. The awful silence was 
interrupted only by the groans of the unhappy 
wretches, who, crushed beneath the falling 
houses, called aloud for some one to put a 
period to their sufferings." — Vol. v. p. 101. 

Such was Russia at its lowest point of de- 
pression in 1378. The steps by which it 
regained its independence and became again 
great and powerful, will furnish abundant 
subject for another article on Karamsin's Mo- 
dern History. 

We know not what impression these ex- 
tracts may have made on our readers, but on 
ourselves they have produced one of the most 
profound description. Nothing can be so 
interesting as to trace the infancy and pro- 
gressive growth of a great nation as of a 
great individual. In both we can discover the 
slow and gradual training of the mind to its 
ultimate destiny, and the salutary influence of 
adversity upon both in strengthening the 
character, and calling forth the energies. It 
is by the slowest possible degrees that nations 
are trained to the heroic character, the patri 
otic spirit, the sustained effort, which is ne- 
cessary to durable elevation. Extraordinary 
but fleeting enthusiasm, the genius of a sin- 



EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



309 



gle man. the conquests of a single nation, may 
often elevate a power like that of Alexander, 
in ancient, or Napoleon in modern times, to 
the very highest pitch of worldly greatness. 
But no reliance can be placed on the stability 
of such empires; they invariably sink as fast 
as they had risen, and leave behind them no- 
thing but. a brilliant, and, generally, awful 
impression on the minds of succeeding ages. 
If we would seek for the only sure foundations 
of lasting greatness, we shall find them in the 
persevering energy of national character; in 
the industry with which wealth has been ac- 
cumulated, and the fortitude with which suf- 
fering has been endured through a long course 
of ages ; and, above all, in the steady and con- 
tinued influence of strong religious impres- 
sions, which, by influencing men in every 
important crisis by a sense of duty, has ren- 
dered them superior to all the storms of for- 
tune. And the influence of these principles is 
nowhere more clearly to be traced than in the 
steady progress and present exalted position 
of the Russian empire. 

Of Karamsin's merits as an author, a con- 
ception may be formed from the extracts we 
have already given. We must not expect in 
the historian of a despotic empire, even when 
recording the most distant events, the just dis- 
crimination, the enlightened views, the fearless 
opinions, which arise, or can be hazarded only 
in a free country. The philosophy of history 
is the slow growth of the opinions of all differ- 
ent classes of men, each directed by their 



ablest leaders, acting and receding upon each 
other through a long course of ages. It was 
almost wholly unknown to the ancient Greeks; 
it was first struck out, at a period when the 
recollections of past freedom contrasted with 
the realities of present servitude, by the 
mighty genius of Tacitus, and the sagacity of 
Machiavelli, the depth of Bacon, the philoso- 
phy of Hume, the glance of Robertson, and 
the wisdom of Guizot, have been necessary to 
bring the science even to the degree of matu- 
rity which it has as yet attained. But in 
brilliancy of description, animation of style, 
and fervour of eloquence. Karamsin is not ex- 
ceeded by any historian in modern times. The 
pictures he has given of the successive 
changes in Russian manners, institutions, and 
government, though hardly so frequent as 
could have been wished, prove that he has in 
him the spirit of philosophy; while in the 
animation of his descriptions of every impor- 
tant event, is to be seen the clearest indication 
that he is gifted with the eye of poetic genius. 
Russia may well be proud of such a work, 
and it is disgraceful to the literature of this 
country that no English translation of it has 
yet appeared. We must, in conclusion, add, 
that the elevated sentiments with which it 
abounds, as well as the spirit of manly piety 
and fervent patriotism in which it is con- 
ceived, diminish our surprise at the continued 
progress of an empire which was capable of 
producing such a writer. 



EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.* 



Ever since the late French Revolution broke 
out, and at a time when it carried with it the 
wishes, and deluded the judgment, of a large 
and respectable portion of the British public, 
we have never ceased to combat the then pre- 
vailing opinion on the subject. We asserted 
from the very outset that it was calculated to 
do incredible mischief to the cause of real 
freedom ; that it would throw back for a very 
long period the march of tranquil liberty; that 
it restored at once the rule of the strongest ; 
and, breaking down the superiority of intellect 
and knowledge by the mere force of numbers, 
would inevitably and rapidly lead, through a 
bitter period of suffering, to the despotism of 
the sword. 

We founded our opinion upon the obvious 
facts, that the Revolution was effected by the 
populace of Paris, by the treachery of the 
army, and the force of the barricades, without 
any appeal to the judgment or wishes of the 
remainder of France ; that a constitution was 
framed, a king chosen, and a government esta- 
blished at the Hotel de Ville, by a junto of en- 
thusiastic heads, without either deliberation, 



* Seize Mois, on La Revolution et La Revolutionaires, 
par N. A. Salvandy, auteur de l'Histoire de la Pologne. 
Paris, 1831.— Blackwood's Magazine, June, 1832. 



time, or foresight; that this new constitution 
was announced to the provinces by the tele- 
graph, before they were even aware that a 
civil war had broken out ; that the Citizen 
King was thus not elected by France, but im- 
posed upon its inhabitants by the mob of Paris ; 
that this convulsion prostrated the few remain- 
ing bulwarks of order and liberty which the 
prior revolution had left standing, and nothing 
remained to oppose the march of revolution, 
and the devouring spirit of Jacobinism, but 
the force of military despotism. That in this 
way no chance existed of liberty being ulti- 
mately established in France, because that in- 
estimable blessing depended on the fusion of 
all the interests of society in the fabric of go- 
vernment, and the prevention of the encroach- 
ments of each class by the influence of the 
others; and such mutual balancing was im- 
possible in a country where the whole middling 
ranks were destroyed, and nothing remained 
but tumultuous masses of mankind on the one 
hand, and an indignant soldiery on the other. 
We maintained that the convulsion at Paris 
was a deplorable catastrophe for the cause of 
freedom in all other countries; that by preci- 
pitating the democratic party everywhere int^ 
revolutionary measures or revolutionary ex- 



310 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



cesses, it would inevitably rouse the conserva- 
tive interests to defend themselves ; that in the 
struggle, real liberty would be equally endan- 
gered by the fury of its insane friends and the 
hostility of its aroused enemies ; and that the 
tranquil spread of freedom, which had been so 
conspicuous since the fall of Napoleon, would 
be exchanged for the rude conflicts of military 
power with popular ambition. 

Few, we believe, comparatively speaking, 
of our readers, fully went along with these 
views when they were first brought forward; 
but how completely have subsequent events 
demonstrated their justice; and how entirely 
has the public mind in both countries changed 
as to the character of this convulsion since it 
took place ! Freedom has been unknown in 
France since the days of the Barricades ; be- 
tween the dread of popular excess on the one 
hand, and the force of military power on the 
other, the independence of the citizens has 
been completely overthrown; Paris has been 
periodically the scene of confusion, riot, and 
anarcnv ; the revolt of Lyons has only been 
extinguished by Marshal Soult at the head of 
as large an army as fought the Duke of Wel- 
lington at Toulouse, and at as great an expense 
of human life as the revolt of the Barricades ; 
the army, increased from 200,000 to 600,000 
men, has been found barely adequate to the 
maintenance of the public tranquillity; 40,000 
men, incessantly stationed round the capital, 
have, almost every month, answered the cries 
of the people for bread by charges of caval- 
ry, and all the severity of military execution; 
the annual expenditure has increased from 
40,000,000/. to 60,000,000/.; fifty millions ster- 
ling of debt has been incurred in eighteen 
months ; notwithstanding a great increase of 
taxation, the revenue has declined a fourth in 
its amount, with the universal suffering of the 
people; and a pestilential disorder following 
as usual in the train of human violence and 
misery, has fastened with unerring certainty 
on the wasted scene of political agitation, and 
swept off twice as many men in a few weeks 
in Paris alone, as fell under the Russian can- 
non on the field of Borodino. 

Externally, have the effects of the three glo- 
rious days been less deplorable ] Let Poland 
answer; let Belgium answer; let the British 
empire answer. Who precipitated a gallant 
nation on a gigantic foe ; and roused their hot 
blood by the promises of sympathy and sup- 
port, and stirred up by their emissaries the re- 
volutionary spirit in the walls of Warsaw] 
Who is answerable to God and man for having 
occasioned its fatal revolt, and buoyed its 
chiefs up with hopes of assistance, and stimu- 
lated them to refuse all offers of accommoda- 
tion, and delivered them up, unaided, unbe- 
friended, to an infuriated conqueror 1 The 
revolutionary leaders; the revolutionary press 
of France and England ; the government of 
Louis Philippe, and the reforming ministers 
of England; those, who, knowing that they 
could render them no assistance, allowed their 
journals, uncontradicted, to stimulate them to 
resistance, and delude them to the last with 
the hopes of foreign intervention. Who is 
auswerable to God and man for the Belgian 



revolt] Who has spread famine and desola- 
tion through its beautiful provinces, and 
withered its industry with a blast worse than, 
the simoom of the desert ; and sown on the 
theatre of British glory those poisoned teeth, 
which must spring up in armed battalions, and 
again in the end involve Europe in the whirl- 
wind of war] The revolutionary leaders ; the 
revolutionary press of France and England; 
the government of Louis Philippe, and the re- 
forming ministers of this country; those who 
betrayed the interests of their country in the 
pursuit of democratic support; who dismem- 
bered the dominions of a faithful ally, and 
drove him back at the cannon mouth, when on 
the point of regaining his own capital ; who 
surrendered the barrier of Marlborough and 
Wellington, and threw open the gates of Eu- 
rope to republican ambition after they had been 
closed by British heroism. Who are answer- 
able to God and man for the present distracted 
state of the British empire 1 Who have sus- 
pended its industry, and shaken its credit, and 
withered its resources] Who have spread 
bitterness and distrust through its immense 
population, and filled its poor with expectations 
that can never be realized, and its rich with 
terrors that can never be allayed ] Who have 
thrown the torch of discord into the bosom of 
an united people; and habituated the lower 
orders to license, and inflated them with arro- 
gance, and subjugated thought and wisdom by 
the force of numbers, and arrayed against the 
concentrated education and wealth of the na- 
tion the masses of its ignorant and deluded 
inhabitants 1 The reforming ministers ; the 
revolutionary press of England; those who 
ascended to power amidst the transports of the 
Barricades ; who incessantly agitated the peo- 
ple to uphold their falling administration, and 
have incurred the lasting execration of man- 
kind, by striving to array the numbers of the 
nation against its intelligence, and subjugate 
the powers of the understanding by the fury 
of the passions. 

To demonstrate that these statements are not 
overcharged as to the present condition of 
France, and the practical consequence of the 
Revolution of the Barricades, we subjoin the 
following extract from an able and independ- 
ent reforming journal. 

" If a government is to be judged of by the 
condition of the people, as a tree by its fruits, 
the present government of France must be 
deemed to be extremely deficient in those qua- 
lities of statesmanship which are calculated to 
inspire public confidence and make a people 
happy — for public discontent, misery, commotion, 
and bloodshed, have been the melancholy cha- 
racteristics of its sway. If the ministry of 
Louis Philippe were positively devoted to the 
interests of the ex-royal family, they could not 
take more effective steps than they have hitherto 
done to make the vices of the family be for- 
gotten, and to reinforce the ranks of the party 
which labours incessantly for their recall. 

"With short intervals of repose, Paris has 
been a scene of cmeutes and disturbances which 
would disgrace a semi-civilized country, and 
to this sort of intermittent turbulence it has 
been doomed ever since Louis Philippe ascended the 



EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



311 



throne, but more especially since Casimir Perier 
was intrusted with the reins of responsible go- 
vernment. It is a melancholy fact that, under 
the revolutionized government of France, more 
blood has been shed in conflicts between the 
people and the military, than during the fifteen 
years of the Restoration, if we except the three 
days of resistance to the ordinances in Paris, 
which ended in the dethronement of Charles 
the Tenth. 

" Yet we do not know if we ought to except 
the carnage of those three days, for we recol- 
lect having seen a communication from Lyons, 
soon after the commotions in that city, in 
which it was stated that a greater number of 
persons, both citizens and soldiers, fell in the 
conflict between the workmen and the military, 
than were slain during the memorable three 
days of Paris. Let us add to this the slaughter 
at Grenoble, where the people were again 
victorious, and the sabrings and shootings 
which have taken place in minor conflicts in 
several towns and departments, and it will be 
found that the present government maintaius 
its power at a greater cost of French blood 
than that which it has superseded." — Morning 
Herald. 

We have long and anxiously looked for some 
publication from a man of character and lite- 
rary celebrity of the liberal party in France, 
which might throw the same light on the con- 
sequences of its late revolution as the work of 
M. Dumont has done on the proceedings of the 
Constituent Assembly. Such a work is now 
before us, from the able and eloquent pen of 
M. Salvandy, to whose striking history of Po- 
land we have in a recent number requested 
the attention of our readers. He has always 
been a liberal, opposed in the Chamber of De- 
puties all the arbitrary acts of the late govern- 
ment, and is a decided defender of the Revolu- 
tion of July. From such a character the tes- 
timony borne to its practical effects is of the 
highest value. 

" The Restoration," says he, "bore in its bo- 
som an enemy, from whose attacks France 
required incessant protection. That enemy 
was the counter revolutionary spirit; in other 
words, the passion to deduce without reserve 
all its consequences from the principle of legi- 
timacy ; the desire to overturn, for the sake of 
the ancient interests, the political system esta- 
blished by the Revolution, and consecrated by 
the Charter and a thousand oaths. It was the 
cancer which consumed it; the danger was 
pointed out for fifteen years, and at length it 
devoured it. 

" The Revolution of July also bore in its 
entrails another curse : this was the revolu- 
tionary spirit, evoked from the bloody chaos 
of our first Revolution, by the sound of the 
rapid victory of the people over the royalty. 
That fatal spirit has weighed upon the desti- 
nies of France, since the Revolution of 1830, 
like its evil genius. I write to illustrate its 
effects; and I feel I should ill accomplish my 
task if I did not at the same time combat its 
doctrines. 

" The counter-revolution was no ways for- 
midable, but in consequence of the inevitable 
understanding which existed between its sup- 



porters and the crown, who, although it long 
refused them its arms, often lent them its 
shield. The revolutionary spirit has also a 
powerful ally, which communicates to it force 
from its inherent energy. This ally is the de- 
mocracy which now reigns as a despot over France; 
that is, without moderation, without wisdom, 
without perceiving that it reigns only for the 
behoof of the spirit of disorder — that terrible 
ally which causes it to increase its own power, 
and will terminate by destroying it. It is time 
to speak to the one and the other a firm lan- 
guage ; to recall to both principles as old as 
the world, which have never yet been violated 
with impunity by nations, and which succes- 
sively disappear from the midst of us, stifled 
under the instinct of gross desires, rash pas- 
sions, pusillanimous concessions, and subver- 
sive laws. Matters are come to such a point, 
that no small courage is now required to un- 
fold these sacred principles ; and yet all the 
objects of the social union, the bare progress 
of nations, the dignity of the human race, the 
cause of freedom itself, is at stake. That 
liberty is to be seen engraven at the gate of all 
our cities, emblazoned on all our monuments, 
floating on all our standards; but, alas! it 
will float there in vain if the air which we 
breathe is charged with anarchy, as with a 
mortal contagion, and if that scourge marks 
daily with its black mark some of our maxims, 
of our laws, of our powers, while it is inces- 
santly advancing to the destruction of society 
itself." 

" What power required the sacrifice of the 
peerage 1 Let the minister answer it, he said 
it again and again with candour and courage. 
It is to popular prejudice, democratic passion, the 
intoxication of demagogues, the blind hatred of every 
species of superiority, that this immense sacrifice has 
been offered. I do not fear to assert, that a na- 
tion which has enforced such a sacrifice, on 
such altars ; a nation which could demand or 
consent to such a sacrifice, has declared itself 
in the face of the world ignorant of freedom, 
and perhaps incapable of enjoying it. 

" That was the great battle of our revolu- 
tionary party. It has gained it. It is no longer 
by our institutions that we can be defended 
from its enterprises and its folly. The good 
sense of the public is now our last safeguard. 
But let us not deceive ourselves. Should the 
public spirit become deranged, we are undone. 
It depends in future on a breath of opinion, 
whether anarchy should not rise triumphant 
in the midst of the powers of government. 
Mistress of the ministry by the elections, it 
would speedily become so of the Tipper House, 
by the new creations which it would force upon the 
crown. The Upper House will run the risk, at 
every quinquennial renewal of its numbers, of 
becoming a mere party assemblage: an as- 
sembly elected at second hand by the Chamber of 
Deputies and the electoral colleges. The ruling 
party henceforth, instead of coming to a com- 
promise with it, which constitutes the balance 
of the three powers, and the basis of a constitu- 
tional monarchy, will only require to incorporate 
itself with it. At the first shock of parties, the 
revolutionary faction will gain this immense 
advantage ; it will emerge from the bosom of 



312 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



our institutions as from its eyrie, and reign 
over France with the wings of terror. 

"In vain do the opposing parties repeat that 
the Revolution of 1830 does not resemble that 
of 1789. That is the very point at issue ; and 
I will indulge in all your hopes, if you are not 
as rash as your predecessors, as ready to de- 
stroy, as much disposed to yield to popular 
wishes, that is, to the desire of the demagogues who 
direct them. But can I indulge the hope, that a 
people will not twice in forty years commence 
the same career of faults and misfortunes, 
when you who have the reins of power, are 
already beginning the same errors ? I must 
say, the Revolution of 1830 runs the same risk 
as its predecessor, if it precipitates its chariot 
to the edge of the same precipices. Every- 
where the spirit of 1791 will bear the same 
fruits. In heaven as in earth, it can engender 
only the demon of anarchy. 

" The monarchy of the Constituent Assem- 
bly, that monarchy which fell almost as soon 
as it arose, did not perish, as is generally sup- 
posed, from an imperfect equilibrium of power, 
a bad definition of the royal prerogative, or the 
weakness of the throne. No — the vice lay 
deeper; it was in its entrails. The old crown 
of England was not adorned with more jewels 
than that ephemeral crown of the King of the 
French. But the crown of England possesses 
in the social, not less than the political state 
of England, powerful support, of which France 
is totally destitute. A constitution without 
guarantees there reposed on a society which 
was equally destitute of them, which was as 
movable as the sands of Africa, as easily 
raised by the breaths of whirlwinds. The Re- 
volution which founded that stormy society, 
founded it on false and destructive principles. 
Not content with levelling to the dust the an- 
cient hierarchy, the old privileges of the orders, 
the corporate rights of towns, which time had 
doomed to destruction, it levelled with the same 
stroke the most legitimate guarantees as the 
most artificial distinctions. It called the masses 
of mankind not to cqualiy, but to supremacy. 

"The constitution was established on the 
same principles. In defiance of the whole ex- 
perience of ages, the Assembly disdained every 
intermediate or powerful institution which was 
founded on those conservative principles, without 
attention to which no stole on earth has ever yet 
flourished. In a word, it called the masses not 
to liberty, but to power. 

"After having done this, no method re- 
mained to form a counterpoise to this terrible 
power. A torrent had been created without 
bounds — an ocean without a shore. By the 
eternal laws of nature, it was furious, indomi- 
table, destructive, changeable ; leaving nothing 
standing but the scaffolds on which royalty 
and rank, and all that was illustrious in talent 
and virtue, speedily fell; until the people, dis- 
abused by suffering, and worn out by passion, 
resigned their fatal sovereignty into the hands 
of a great man. Such it was, such it will be, 
to the end of time. The same vices, the same 
scourges, the same punishments. 

" When you do not wish to fall into an abyss, 
you must avoid the path which leads to it. 
When you condemn a principle, you must 



have the courage to condemn its premises, or 
to resign yourself to see the terrible logic of 
party, the austere arms of fortune, deduce its 
consequences ; otherwise, you plant a tree, and 
refuse to eat its fruits ; you form a volcano, 
and expect to sleep in peace by its side. 

"With the exception of the Constituent As- 
sembly, where all understandings were fasci- 
nated, where there reigned a sort of sublime 
delirium, all the subsequent legislatures dur- 
ing the Revolution did evil, intending to do 
good. The abolition of the monarchy was a 
concession of the Legislative Assembly ; the 
head of the king an offering of the Convention. 
The Girondists in the Legislative Body, in sur- 
rendering the monarchy, thought they were 
doing the only thing which could save order. 
Such was their blindness, that they could not see 
that their own acts had destroyed order, and its 
last shadow vanished with the fall of the throne. 
The Plain, or middle party in the Convention, by 
surrendering Louis to the executioner, thought 
to satiate the people wiih that noble blood ; and 
they were punished for it, by being compelled 
to give their own, and that of all France. It 
was on the same principle that in our times 
the peerage has fallen the victim of deplorable con- 
cessions. May that great concession, which 
embraces more interests, and destroys more 
conservative principles than are generally sup- 
posed, which shakes at once all the pillars of 
the social order, not prepare for those who 
have occasioned it unavailing regret and de- 
served punishment! 

"The divine justice has a sure means of 
punishing the exactions, the passions, and the 
weakness which subvert society. It consists in 
allowing the parties who urge on the torrent, to reap 
the consequences of their actions. Thus they go 
on, without disquieting themselves as to the 
career on which they have entered; without 
once looking behind them ; thinking only on 
the next step they have to make in the revolu- 
tionary progress, and always believing that it 
will be the last. But the weight of committed 
faults drags them on, and they perish under the 
rock of Sisyphus. 

" I will not attempt to conceal my senti- 
ments ; the political and moral state of my 
country fills me with consternation. When 
you contemplate its population in general, so 
calm, so laborious, so desirous to enjoy in 
peace the blessings which the hand of God has 
poured so liberally into the bosom of our beau- 
tiful France, you are filled with hope, and con- 
template with the eye of hope the future state 
of our country. But if you direct your look to 
the region where party strife combats ; if you 
contemplate the incessant efforts to excite in 
the masses of the population all the bad pas- 
sions of the social order; to rouse them afresh 
when they are becoming dormant; to enrol 
them in regular array when they are floating; 
to make, for the sake of contending interests, 
one body, and march together to one prey, 
which they will dispute in blood ; how is it 
possible to mistake, in that delirium of pas- 
sion, in that oblivion of the principles of order, 
in that forgetfulness of the conditions on which 
it depends, the fatal signs which precede the 
most violent convulsions ! A people in whose 



EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



313 



bosom, for sixteen months, disorder has marched 
ivith i's head erect, and its destroying axe in 
hand, has not yet settled its accounts with the 
wrath of Heaven. 

"While I am yet correcting these lines; 
while I am considering if they do not make too 
strong a contrast to the public security — if 
they do not too strongly express my profound 
conviction of the dangers of my country — the 
wrath of Heaven has burst upon that France, 
half blinded, half insane. Fortune has too 
cruelly justified my sinister presages. Revolt, 
assassination, civil war, have deluged with 
blood a great city; and it would be absurd to 
be astonished at it. We have sown the seeds 
of anarchy with liberal hands ; it is a crop 
which never fails to yield a plentiful harvest. 

"It is to the men of property, of whatever 
party, that I now address myself: to those who 
have no inclination for anarchy, whatever may 
be its promises or its menaces ; to those who 
would fear, by running before it, to surrender 
the empire to its ravages, and to have to an- 
swer to God and man for the disastrous days, 
the dark futurity of France. I address myself 
to them, resolved to unfold to the eyes of my 
country all our wounds ; to follow out, even to 
its inmost recesses, the malady which is de- 
vouring us. It will be found, that, in the last 
result, they all centre in one ; and that is the 
same which has already cleft in two this great 
body, and brought the country to the brink of 
ruin. We speak of liberty, and it is the govern- 
ment of the masses of men which tee labour to esta- 
blish. Equality is the object of our passionate 
desires, and we confound it with levelling. I 
know not what destiny Providence has in re- 
serve for France ; but I do not hesitate to as- 
sert, that, so long as that double prejudice shall 
subsist amongst us, we will find no order but 
under the shadow of despotism, and may bid a 
final adieu to liberty." — Pp. 20—36. 

There is hardly a sentence in this long quo- 
tation, that is not precisely applicable to this 
country, and the revolutionary party so vehe- 
mently at work amongst ourselves. How 
strikingly applicable are his observations on 
the destruction of the hereditary peerage, and 
the periodical creations which will prostrate the 
upper house before the power of the demo- 
cracy, to the similar attempt made by the revo- 
lutionary party in this country ! But how dif- 
ferent has been the resistance made to the at- 
tempt to overthrow this last bulwark of order 
in the two states ! In France, the Citizen 
King, urged on by the movement party, cre- 
ated thirty Peers io subdue that assembly, and by 
their aid destroyed the hereditary peerage, and 
knocked from under the throne the last sup- 
ports of order and freedom. In Great Britain, 
the same course was urged by an insane popu- 
lace, and a reckless administration, on the 
crown; and an effort, noble indeed, but, it is 
to be feared, too late, was made by the crown 
to resist the sacrifice. The " Masses" of man- 
kind, those immense bodies whom it is the 
policy of the revolutionary party in every 
country to enlist on their side, are still agitated 
and discontented. But, thanks to the generous 
efforts of the Conservative party, the noble re- 
sistance of the House of Peers, and the ulti- 
40 



mate effort for liberation by the crown, the 
flood of revolution has been at least delayed ; 
and if the constitution is doomed to destruc- 
tion, the friends of freedom have at least the 
consolation of having struggled to the last to 
avert it.* 

Salvandy gives the basis on which alone, in 
his opinion, the social edifice can with safety 
be reconstructed. His observations are sin- 
gularly applicable to the future balance which 
must obtain in the British empire: 

"The more democratic the French popula- 
tion becomes from its manners and its laws, 
the more material it is that its government 
should incline in the opposite direction, to be 
able to withstand that flux and reflux of free 
and equal citizens. The day of old aristocra- 
cies, of immovable and exclusive aristocra- 
cies, is past. Our social, our political condi- 
tion, will only permit of such as are accessible 
to all. But all may arrive at distinction, for 
the paths to eminence are open to all ; all may 
acquire property, for it is an acquisition which 
order and talent may always command. In 
such a state of society, is it a crime to insist 
that power shall not be devolved but to such 
as have availed themselves of these universal 
capabilities, and have arrived either at emi- 
nence or property ; to those who have reached 
the summit of the ladder in relation to the com- 
mune, the department, or the state, to which 
they belong] No, it is no crime; for if you 
cast your eyes over the history of the world, 
you will find that freedom was never yet ac- 
quired but at that price. 

"It is the law of nature that societies and 
nations should move like individuals; that the 
head should direct the whole. Then only it is 
that the power of intelligence, the moral force, 
is enabled to govern ; and the perfection of 
such moral and intellectual combinations is 
freedom. The party in France who support 
a republic, do so because they consider it 
as synonymous with democracy. They are in 
the right. Democrac}', without the most power- 
ful counterpoises, leads necessarily to popular 
anarchy. It has but one way to avoid that des- 
tiny, and that is despotism ; and thence it is that 
it invariably terminates, weary and blood)', by 
reposing beneath its shades." — Pp. 44, 45. 

Numerous as have been the errors, and cul- 
pable the recklessness, of the Reform rulers of 
England ; their constant appeal to the masses 
of mankind; their attempt to trample down 
intelligence, education, and property by the 
force of numbers; their ceaseless endeavours 
to sway the popular elections, in every part of 
the country, by brutal violence and rabble in 
timidation, is the most crying sin which besets 
them. It will hang like a dead weight about 
their necks in the page of history; it will blast 
for ever their characters in the eyes of pos- 
terity; it will stamp them as men who sought 
to subvert all the necessary and eternal rela- 
tions of nature ; to introduce a social, far worse 
than a political revolution ; and subject Eng- 
land to that rule of the multitude, which must 
engender a Reign of Terror and a British Na- 
poleon. 



* Written shortly after the rejection of the Reform 
Bill by the House of Peers. 

2D 



314 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Our author gives the following graphic pic- 
ture of the state of France for a year and a 
half after the Revolution of July. Sow exactly 
does it depict the state of the British islands 
afier eighteen months of popular domination! 

"For eighteen months the greatest political 
lessons have been taught to France. On the 
one hand, we have seen what it has cost its 
rulers to have attempted to subvert the laws; 
on the other what such a catastrophe costs a 
nation, even when it is most innocently in- 
volved in it. The state, shaken to its centre, 
does not settle down without long efforts. The 
farther the imagination of the people has been 
carried, the more extravagant the expectations 
they have been permitted to form, the more 
difficulty have the unchained passions to sub- 
mit to the yoke of constituted authority, or le- 
gal freedom. Real liberty, patient, wise, and 
regular, irritates as a fetter those who, having 
conquered by the sword, cannot conceive any 
better arbiter for human affairs. To insurrec- 
tion for the laws, succeeds everywhere, and 
without intermission, insurrection against the 
laws. From all quarters, the desire is mani- 
fested for new conquests, a new futurity; and 
that devouring disquietude knows no barrier, 
before which the ambitions, the hatreds, the 
theories, the destruction of men, may be ar- 
rested. It appears to the reformers, that all 
rights should perish, because one has fallen. 
There is no longer an institution which they do not 
attach; nor an interest which does not feel itself com- 
promisuL The disorder of ideas becomes uni- 
versal . the anxiety of minds irresistible. A 
city, with 100,000 armed men in the streets, no 
longer feels itself in safety. Should the public 
spirit arouse itself, it is only to fall under the 
weight of popular excesses, and still more dis- 
quieting apprehension. For long will prevail 
that universal and irresistible languor; hardly 
in a generation will the political body regain 
its life, its security, its confidence in itself. 
What has occasioned this calamitous state of 
things? Simply this. Force — popular /'one, 
has usurped a place in the destinies of the na- 
tion, and its appearance necessarily inflicts a 
fatal wound on the regular order of human 
society. Every existence has been endanger- 
ed when that principle was proclaimed." — 
Pp. 50, 51. 

" England has done the same to its sovereign 
as the legislators of July ; and God has since 
granted to that nation one hundred and forty 
years of prosperity and glory; But let it be 
observed, that when it abandoned the principle 
of legitimacy, England made no change in its 
social institutions. The JSristocracy still retained 
their ascendency.: though the keystone of the 
arch was thrown down, they removed none of 
its foundations. But suppose that the English 
people had proceeded, at the same time that 
they overthrew the Stuarts, to overturn their 
civil laws and hereditary peerage — to force 
through Parliamentary Reform, remodel juries, 
bind all authorities beneath the yoke of the po- 
pulace, extended fundamental changes into the 
state, the church, and the army : had it tole- 
rated a doctrine which is anarchy itself, the doctrine 
of universal suffrage: suppose, in fine, that it had 
been in the first fervour of the revolutionary 



intoxication, that parliament had laid the axe 
to all subsisting institutions : then, I say, that 
the Revolution of 1688 would most certainly 
have led the English people to their ruin; that 
it would have brought forth nothing but 
tyranny, or been sthled in blood and tears." — 
Pp. 69, 60. 

The real state of France, under the Restora- 
tion, has been the subject of gross misrepre- 
sentation from all the liberal writers in Europe. 
Let us hear the testimony of this supporter of 
the Revolution of July, to its practical opera- 
tion. 

"The government of the Restoration was a 
constitutional, an aristocratic, and a free mon- 
archy. It was monarchical in its essence, and 
in the prerogatives which it reserved to the 
crown. It was free, that is no longer contested. In- 
violability of persons and property; personal 
freedom; the liberty of the press; equality in 
the eye of law; the institution of juries ; in- 
dependence in the judiciary body; responsi- 
bility in the agents of power ; comprised every 
thing that was ever known of freedom in the 
universe. Public freedom consisted in the 
division of the legislative authority between 
the king and the people — the independence of 
both Chambers — the annual voting of supplies 
— the freedom of the periodical press — the es- 
tablishment of a representative government. 

" Democracy, in that regime, was, God knows, 
neither unknown nor disarmed. For in a coun- 
try where the aristocracy is an hotel, open to 
whoever can afford to enter it, it as necessarily 
forms part of the democracy as the head does 
of the body. The whole body of society has 
gained the universal admissibility, and the real 
admission of all to every species of public 
employment; the complete equality of taxa- 
tion ; the eligibility of all to the electoral body ; 
the inevitable preponderance of the middling 
orders in the elections ; in fine, the entire com- 
mand of the periodical press. 

" At the time of the promulgation of the 
Charter, France had not the least idea of what 
freedom was. That Revolution of 40 years' 
duration, which had rolled over us, incessantly 
resounding with the name of liberty, had passed 
away without leaving a conception of what it really 
teas. Coups d'etat — that is, strokes by the 
force of the popular party — composed all its 
annals, equally with all that was to be learn- 
ed from it ; and these violent measures never 
revolted the opinion of the public, as being 
contrary to true freedom, which ever rejects 
force, and reposes only on justice, but merely 
spread dismay and horror through the ranks 
of the opposite party. The only stru„ 6 '.e was, 
who should get the command of these terrible 
arms. On the one hand, these triumphs were 
called order; on the other, liberty. No one 
gave them their true appellation, which was a 
return to the state of barbarous ages, a resto- 
ration of the rule of the strongest." — Pp. 115, 
116. 

These observations are worthy of the most 
profound meditation. Historical truth is be- 
ginning to emerge from the fury of party am- 
bition. Here we have it admitted by a liberal 
historian, that throughout the whole course of 
the French revolution, that is, of the resurrec- 



EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



315 



tion and rule of the masses, there was not only 
no trace of liberty established, but no idea of liberty 

acquired. Successive coups d'etat, perpetual 
insurrection ; a continued struggle for the 
rule of these formidable bodies of the citizens, 
constituted its whole history. They fell at last 
under the yoke of Napoleon, easily and will- 
ingly, because they had never tasted of real 
freedom. That blessing was given to them, 
for the first time, under a constitutional mon- 
archy and a hereditary peerage ; in a word, in 
a mixed government. How instructive the 
lesson to those who have made such strenuous 
endeavours to overturn the mixed government of 
Britain; to establish here the ruinous prepon- 
derance of numbers, and beat down the free- 
dom of thought, by the brutal violence of the 
multitude. 

The following observations are singularly 
striking. Their application need not be point- 
ed out; one would imagine they were written 
to depict the course to which the reforming 
administration is rapidly approaching. 

" There is in the world but two courses of 
policy : the one is regular, legitimate, cautious : 
it leans for support, not on the physical 
strength, but the moral intelligence of man- 
kind, and concedes influence less to the num- 
bers than the lights, the stability, the services, 
the love of order, of the superior class of citizens. 

"This lofty and even policy respects within 
the laws, and without the rights of nations, 
which constitutes the moral law of the uni- 
verse. It conducts mankind slowly and gradu- 
ally to those ameliorations which God has 
made as the end of our efforts, and the com- 
pensation of our miseries ; but it knows that 
Providence has prescribed two conditions to 
this progress, — patience and justice. 

"The other policy has totally different rules, 
and an entirely different method of procedure. 
Force, brutal force, constitutes at once its prin- 
ciple and its law. You will ever distinguish 
it by these symptoms. In all contests between 
citizens, parties, or kingdoms, in every time 
and in every place, it discards the authority of 
justice, which is called the safety of the peo- 
ple; that is to say, the prevailing object of popular 
ambition, or, in other words, mere force, comes in its 
stxnl. Would you know its internal policy: 
difference of opinion is considered as a crime ; 
suspicion is arrest ; punishment, death : it 
knows no law but force to govern mankind. 
Regard its external policy. It regards neither 
the sanction of treaties nor the rights of neu- 
trals, nor the inviolability of their territories, 
nor the conditions of their capitulations: its 
diplomacy is nothing else but war; that is to 
say, force, its last resource in all emergencies. 
In its internal government it has recourse to 
no lengthened discussion, to no delays, no slow d, lib- 
erations ; caprice, anger, murder, cut short all 
questions, without permitting the other side to 
be heard. In a word, in that system, force 
thinks, deliberates, wishes, and executes. It 
rejects all the authority of time and the lessons 
of experience; the past it destroys, the future 
it devours. It must invade every thing, over- 
come every thing, in a single day. Marching 
at the head of menacing masses, it compels all wishes, 
all resistance, all genius, all grandeur, all virtue, to 



bend before those terrible waves, where there is no- 
thing enlightened which is not perverted, nor worthy 
which is not buried in obscurity. What it calls 
liberty consists in the power of dictating its caprice 
to the rest of mankind; to the judge on the seat of 
justice, to the citizen at his fireside, to the legislator 
in. his ciirule chair, to the king on his throne. Thus 
it advances, overturning, destroying. But do 
not speak to it of building; that is beyond its 
power. It is the monster of Asia, which can 
extinguish but not produce existence." — Pp. 
230, 231. 

At the moment that we are translating this 
terrible picture, meetings of the masses of man- 
kind have been convened, by the reforming 
agents, in every part of the country, where by 
possibility they could be got together, to control 
and overturn the decisions of parliament. 
Fifty, sixty, and seventy thousand men, are 
stated to have been assembled at Manchester, 
Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh : their 
numbers are grossly exaggerated; disorders 
wilfully ascribed to them; menacing language 
falsely put into their mouth in order to intimi- 
date the more sober and virtuous class of citi- 
zens. The brickbat and bludgeon system is 
invoked to cover the freedom of the next, as it 
did of the last general election, and obtain that 
triumph from the force of brutal violence, 
which it despairs of effecting by the sober in- 
fluence of reason or justice. Who is so blind 
as not to see in this ostentatious parade of 
numbers, as opposed to knowledge ; in this ap- 
peal to violence, in default of argument; in 
this recourse to the force of masses, to over- 
come the energy of patriotism, the same revo- 
lutionary spirit which Salvandy has so well 
described as forming the scourge of modern 
France, and which never yet became predomi- 
nant in a country, without involving high and 
low in one promiscuous ruin 1 

" England," says the same eloquent writer, 
" has two edifices standing near to each other : 
in the one, assemble from generation to gene- 
ration, to defend the ancient liberties of their 
country, all that the three kingdoms can as- 
semble that is illustrious or respectable : it is 
the chapel of St. Stephens. There have com- 
bated Pitt and Fox : there we have seen 
Brougham, Peel, and Canning, engaged in 
those noble strifes which elevate the dignity of 
human nature, and the very sight of which is 
enough to attach the mind to freedom for the 
rest of its life. At a few paces distance you 
find another arena, other combats, other cham- 
pions : physical force contending with its like ; 
man struggling with his fellow-creature for a 
miserable prize, and exerting no ray of intelli- 
gence, but to plant his blows with more accu 
racy in the body of his antagonist. From that 
spectacle to the glorious one exhibited in par 
liament, the distance is not greater than from 
revolutionary liberty to constitutional free- 
dom."— P. 233. 

To what does the atrocious system of popu- 
lar intimidation, so long encouraged or taken 
advantage of by the reforming party, necessa- 
rily lead but to such a species of revolutionary 
liberty; in other words, to the unrestrained ty- 
ranny of the mob, over all that is dignified, or 
virtuous, or praiseworthy, in society 1 It will 



316 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



be the eternal disgrace of that party ; it will be 
the damning record of the reforming adminis- 
tration, that in the struggle for power, in the 
pursuit of chimerical and perilous changes, 
they invoked the aid of these detestable allies, 
and periled the very existence of society upon 
a struggle in which they could not be success- 
ful but by the aid of powers which never yet 
were let loose without devastating the world 
with their fury. 

"In vain," continues our author, " the Move- 
ment party protest against such a result, and 
strive to support their opinions by the strange 
paradox, that the anarchy, towards which all 
their efforts are urging us, will this time be gen- 
tle, pacific, beneficent; that it will bring back 
the days of legitimacy, and bring them back by 
flowery paths. This brilliant colouring to the 
horrors of anarchy is one of the most deplora- 
ble productions of the spirit of party. For my 
part, I see it in colours of blood ; and that not 
merely from historic recollection, but the na- 
ture of things. Doubtless we will not see the 
Reign of Terror under the same aspect: we 
will not see a Committee of Public Safety 
holding France enchained with a hand of iron : 
we will not see that abominable centralization 
of power: but what we will see is a domici- 
liary terror, more rapid and more atrocious ; 
more destructive than on the first occasion, be- 
cause it will be more nearly allied to the pas- 
sion fo< gain and plunder. What will ulti- 
mately i ome out of it, God only knows ; but 
this we may well affirm, that when the revolu- 
tionary party shall become master of Fiance, 
it will slay and spoil as it has slain and 
spoiled ; that it will decimate the higher classes 
as it has decimated them. I assert, that those 
of the present leaders of the party who shall 
oppose themselves to this horrible result, and 
assuredly the greater number will do so, will 
be crushed under the wheels of the chariot 
which they have so insanely put in motion. I 
maintain that this is a principle of its existence 
— a law of nature; in fine, the means destined 
by Providence for its extinction. Existing solely 
on the support of the masses of mankind; having 
no support but in their aid, it can admit of no 
genius to rule its destinies but their genius. 
Thenceforward it is condemned, for its existence and 
its power, to model itself on the multitude ; to live 
and reign according to its dictation. And the 
multitude, to use the nervous words of Odillon 
Barrot, is ' characterized by barbarity through- 
out all the earth.' 

" Thence it is that every state, which has 
once opened the door to democratic doctrines, 
totters under the draught, and falls, if it is not 
speedily disgorged. Thence it is that every 
society which has received, which has become 
intoxicated with them, abjures the force of rea- 
son, devotes itself to the convulsions of anar- 
chy, and bids at once a long adieu to civiliza- 
tion and to freedom. For the revolutionary 
party, while they are incessantly speaking of 
ameliorations and of perfection, is a thousand 
times more adverse to the progress of the so- 
cial order and of the human mind, than the party 
of the ancient regime, which at least had its prin- 
cipal seat in the higher regions of society; a 
region cultivated, fruitful in intelligence, and 



where the progress of improvement, however 
suspended for a time by the spirit of party, can- 
not fail speedily to regain its course. But our 
Revolutionists do more; they bring us back to 
the barbarous ages, and do so at one bound. 
All their policy may be reduced to two points : 
within, Revolution ; without, War. Every- 
where it is the same — an appeal to the law of 
the strongest ; a return to the ages of barba- 
rism." — P. 248. 

Salvandy paints the classes whose incessant 
agitation is producing these disastrous effects. 
They are not peculiar to France, but will be 
found in equal strength on this side of the 
Channel. 

"Would you know who are the men, and 
what are the passions, which thus nourish the 
flame of Revolution; which stain with blood, 
or shake with terror the world; which sadden 
the people, extinguish industry, disturb repose, 
and suspend the progress of nations ? Behold 
that crowd of young men, fierce republicans, 
barristers without briefs, physicians without 
patients, who make a Revolution to fill up their 
vacant hours — ambitious equally to have their 
names inscribed in the roll of indictments for 
the courts of assizes, as in the records of fame. 
And it is for such ambitions that blood has 
flowed in Poland, Italy, and Lyons ! The ri- 
valry of kings never occasioned more disas- 
ters."— P. 270. 

One of the most interesting parts of this va- 
luable work, is the clear and luminous account 
which the author gives of the practical changes 
in the constitution, ideas, and morals, of 
France, by the late Revolution. Every word 
of it may be applied to the perils which this 
country runs from the Reform Bill. It is evi- 
dent that France has irrecoverably plunged in- 
to the revolutionary stream, and that it will 
swallow up its liberties, its morals, in the end, 
its existence. 

"The constitution of the National Guard," 
says our author, " is monstrous from beginning 
to end. There has sprung from it hitherto 
more good than evil, because the spirit of the 
people is still better than the institutions which 
the revolutionary party have given it ; and that 
they have not hitherto used the arms so insane- 
ly given them, without any consideration. But 
this cannot continue ; the election of officers 
by the privates is subversive of all the princi- 
ples of government. The right of election has 
been given to them unthout reserve, in direct vio- 
lation of the Charter, on the precedent of 1791, 
and in conformity to the wishes of M. Lafayette. 

" In this National Guard, this first of political 
powers, since the maintenance of the Charter 
is directly intrusted to it — in that power, the 
most democratic that ever existed upon earth, 
since it consists of six million of citizens, equal 
among each other, and possessing equally the 
right of suffrage, which consists in a bayonet 
and ball-cartridges, we have not established for 
any ranks any condition, either of election or 
of eligibility. It is almost miraculous that the 
anarchists have not more generally succeeded 
in seizing that terrible arm. They have done 
so, however, in many places. Thence has 
come that scandal, that terrible calamity of 
the National Guards taking part in the insur- 



EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



317 



rections, and marching in the ranks of anar- 
chy with drums beating and colours flying. 
The sword is now our only refuge, and the 
sword is turned against us ! While I am yet 
writing these convictions, in the silence of me- 
ditation and grief, a voice stronger than mine 
proclaims them in accents of thunder. Lyons 
has shown them written in blood. It is the 
handwriting on the wall which appeared to 
Belshazzar."— P. 391. 

Of the changes in the electoral body, and the 
power of parliament, effected since the Revolu- 
tion of July, he gives the following account: 

" The power of parliament has been strength- 
ened by all which the royal authority has lost. 
It has gained in addition the power of propos- 
ing laws in either chamber. The elective 
power, above all, has been immensely extend- 
ed; for of the two chambers, that which was 
esteemed the most durable, and was intended 
to give stability to our institutions, has been so 
cruelly mutilated by the exclusions following 
the Revolution of July, and the subsequent crea- 
tions to serve a particular purpose, that it is no 
longer of any weight in the state. The whole 
powers of government have centred in the 
Chamber of Deputies." 

The right of election has been extended to 
300,000 Frenchmen; the great colleges have 
been abolished; the qualification for eligibility 
has been lowered one half as the qualification 
for electing; and the farmers have been sub- 
stituted for the great proprietors in the power 
of a double vote. The power of regulating the 
affairs of departments has been devolved to 
800,000 citizens ; that of regulating the com- 
munes to 2,500,000. The power of arms has 
been surrendered to all ; and the power of 
electing its leaders given to the whole armed 
force without distinction. 

" In this way property is entirely excluded 
from all influence in the election of magis- 
trates; it has but one privilege left, that of 
bearing the largest part of the burdens, and 
every species of outrage, vexation, and abuse. 
As a natural consequence, the communes have 
been ill administered, and nothing but the 
worst passions regulate the election of their 
officers. The municipal councils are com- 
posed of infinitely worse members than they 
were before the portentous addition made to 
the number of their electors. To secure the 
triumph of having a bad mayor, a mayor suited 
to their base and ignorant jealousies, they are 
constrained to elect bad magistrates, dbyssus 
abyssum vocat. 

" In the political class of electors, the effects 
of the democratic changes have been still 
worse. The power of mobs has become irresistible. 
The electoral body, which for fifteen years has 
struggled for the liberties of France, has been 
dispossessed by a body possessing less inde- 
pendence, less intelligence, which understands 
less the duties to which it is called. Every- 
where the respectable classes, sure of being out- 
voted, have stayed away from the elections. In the 
department in which I write, an hundred 
voices have carried the election, because 300 
respectable electors have not made their ap- 
pearance. In all parts of the kingdom, the 
same melancholy spectacle presents itself. 



The law has made a class arbiters of the af- 
fairs of the kingdom, which has the good sense 
to perceive its utter unfitness for the task, or 
its inability to contend with the furious torrent 
with which it is surrounded ; and the conse- 
quence everywhere has been, that intrigue, 
and every unworthy passion, govern the elec- 
tions, and a set of miserable low intriguers 
rule France with a rod of iron. In the state, 
the department, the communes, the National 
Guard, the prospect is the same. The same 
principle governs the organization, or rather 
disorganization, throughout the whole of so- 
ciety. Universally it is the lower part of the 
electoral body, ivhich, being the most numerous, the 
most reckless, and the most compact, casts the ba- 
lance ; in short, it is the tail which governs 
the head. There is the profound grievance 
which endangers all our liberties. On such con- 
ditions, no social union is possible among men. 
"Recently our electors have made a dis- 
covery, which fixes in these inferior regions, 
not merely the power of election, but the whole 
political authority in the state ; it is the prac- 
tice of exacting from their representatives, 
before they are elected, pledges as to every mea- 
sure of importance which is to come befm-e them. 
By that single expedient, the representative 
system, with all its guarantees and blessings, 
has crumbled into dust. Its fundamental prin- 
ciple is, that the three great powers form the 
head of the state; that all three discuss, de- 
liberate, decide, with equal freedom on the 
affairs of the state. The guarantee of this 
freedom consists in the composition of these 
powers, the slow method of their procedure, 
the length of previous debates, and the control 
of each branch of the legislature by the others. 
But the exacting of pledges from members of 
parliament destroys all this. Deliberation and 
choice are placed at the very bottom of the 
political ladder, and there alone. What do I 
say ? Deliberation! the thing is unknown 
even there. A hair-brained student seizes at 
the gate of a city a peasant, asks him if he is 
desirous to see feudality with all its seig- 
neurial rights re-established, puts into his 
hands a name to vote for, which will preserve 
him from all these calamities, and having thus 
sent him totally deluded into the election hall, 
returns to his companions, and laughs with 
them at having thus secured a vote for the 
abolition of the peerage. 

"As little is the inclination of the electors 
consulted in their preliminary resolutions. It 
is in the wine-shops, amidst the fumes of intoxi- 
cation, that the greatest questions are decided ; 
without hearing the other side, without any 
knowledge on the subject; without the small- 
est information as to the matter on which an 
irrevocable decision is thus taken. This is 
what is called the liberty of democracy; a 
brutal, ignorant, reckless liberty, which cuts 
short all discussion, and decides every ques- 
tion without knowledge, without discussion, 
without examination, from the mere force of 
passion." 

Of the present state of the French press, we 
have the following emphatic account. De- 
mocracy, it will be seen, produces everywhere 
the same effects. 

2d2 



318 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



"At the spectacle of the press of France, I 
experienced the grief of an old soldier, who 
sees his arms profaned. The press is no 
longer that sure ally of freedom, which follows, 
step by step, the depositories of power, but 
without contesting with them their necessary 
prerogatives, or striving to sap the foundations 
of the state. It is an Eumenides, a Bacchante, 
which agitates a torch, a hatchet, or a poniard; 
which insults and strikes without intermis- 
sion ; which applies itself incessantly, in its 
lucid intervals, to demolish, stone by stone, 
the whole social edifice ; which seems tor- 
mented by a devouring fever ; which requires 
to revenge itself for the sufferings of a consum- 
ing pride, by the unceasing work of destruc- 
tion. In other states, it has been found that 
calumny penetrates into the field of polemical 
contest. But France has gone a step farther; 
it possesses whole workshops of calumny. 
Insult possesses its seats of manufacture. We 
have numerous journals, which live by attack- 
ing every reputation, every talent, every spe- 
cies of superiority. It is an artillery incessantly 
directed to level every thing tvhich is elevated, or 
serves or honours its country. It is no wonder 
that the observation should be so common, 
that society is undergoing an incessant degra- 
dation. A society in the midst of which a 
disorder so frightful is daily appearing, with- 
out exciting either attention or animadversion, 
is on the high road to ruin. It is condemned 
to the chastisement of heaven." — Pp. 394 — 399. 

One would imagine that the following pas- 
sage was written expressly for the state of the 
British revolutionary press, during the discus- 
sion of the Reform Bill. 

" The more that the progress of the Revolu- 
tion produced of inevitable concessions to the 
passion for democracy, the more indispen- 
sable it was, that the press should have taken 
an elevated ground, to withstand the torrent. 
The reverse has been the case. Thence have 
flowed that perpetual degradation of its ten- 
dency, that emulation in calumny and detrac- 
tion, that obstinate support of doctrines subver- 
sive of society, those appeals to the passions of 
the multitude, that ostentatious display of the logic 
of brickbats, that indignation at every historic 
name, those assaults on every thing that is 
dignified or hereditary, on the throne, the peer- 
age, property itself. Deplorable corruption ! 
permanent corruption of talent, virtue, and 
genius ! total abandonment of its glorious mis- 
sion to enlighten, glorify, and defend its coun- 
try."— P. 402. 

The radical vice in the social system of 
France, our author considers as consisting in 
the overwhelming influence given to that class 
a little above the lowest, in other words, the 10/. 
householders, in whom, with unerring accu- 
racy, the Revolutionists of England persuaded 
an ignorant and reckless administration to 
centre all the political power of this country. 
Listen to its practical working in France, as 
detailed by this liberal constitutional writer: — 

" The direct tendency of all our laws, is to 
deliver over the empire to one single class in society : 
that class, elevated just above the lowest, 
which has enough of independence and edu- 
cation to be inspired with the desire to centre 



in itself all the powers of the state, but too 
little to wield them with advantage. This 
class forms the link between the upper 7-anks of 
the Tiers Etat and the decided anarchists ; and it 
is actuated by passion, the reverse of those of 
both the regions on which it borders. Suffi- 
ciently near to the latter to be not more dis- 
turbed than it at the work of destruction, it is 
sufficiently close to the former to be filled with 
animosity at its prosperity: it participates in 
the envy of the one, and the pride of the other 
in fatal union, which corrupts the mediocrity 
of their intelligence, their ignorance of the af- 
fairs of state, the narrow and partial view they 
take of every subject. Thence has sprung 
that jealous and turbulent spirit which can do 
nothing but destroy : which assails with its 
wrath every thing which society respects, the 
throne equally with the altar, power equally 
with distinction : a spirit equally fatal to all 
above and all below itself, which dries up all 
the sources of prosperity, by overturning the 
principles, the feelings, which form the counter- 
poise of society ; and which a divine legislator 
has implanted on the most ancient tables of 
the law, the human conscience. 

"Thus have we gone on for eighteen months, 
accumulating the principles of destruction : 
the more that we have need of public wisdom 
for support, the more have we receded from 
it. The evil will become irreparable, if the 
spirit of disorder, which has overthrown our 
authorities, and passed from the authorities 
into the laws, should find a general entrance 
into the minds of the people. — There lies the 
incurable wound of France." — P. 405. 

It was in the face of such testimony to the 
tremendous effect of rousing democratic am- 
bition in the lowest of the middling class of 
society ; it was within sight of an empire 
wasting away under their withering influence, 
that the Reformers roused them to a state of 
perfect fury, by the prospect of acquiring, 
through the 10L clause, an irresistible pre- 
ponderance in the state. We doubt if the his- 
tory of the world exhibits another instance of 
such complete infatuation. 

Is the literature of France in such a state 
as to justify a hope, that a better day is likely 
to dawn on its democratic society"! Let us 
hear what the friend of constitutional freedom 
says on that vital subject — 

" There is a moral anarchy far worse than 
that of society, which saps even the founda- 
tion of order, which renders it hardly consist- 
ent even with despotism : utterly inconsistent 
with freedom. We have seen political princi- 
ples and belief often sustain the state, in de- 
fault of laws and institutions ; but to what are 
we to look for a remedy to the disorder which 
has its seat in the heart ? 

" Were literature to be regarded as the ex- 
pression of thought, there is not a hope left 
for France. Literary talent now shows itself 
stained with every kind of corruption. It 
makes it a rule and a sport to attack every 
sentiment and interest of which society is 
composed. One would imagine that its object 
is to restore to French literature all the vices 
with which it was disgraced in the last cen- 
tury. If, on the faith of daily eulogiums, you 



EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 



319 



go into a theatre, you see scenes represented 
where the dignity of our sex is as much out- 
raged as the modesty of the other. Everywhere 
the same spectacles await you. Obscene ro- 
mances are the model on which they are all 
formed. The muse now labours at what is 
indecent, as formerly it did at what would 
melt the heart. How unhappy the young 
men, who think they ape the elegance of 
riches by adopting its vices, — who deem them- 
selves original, merely because they are re- 
trograding, and who mistake the novels of 
Crebillon and Voltaire for original genius ! 
It would seem that these shameful excesses 
are the inevitable attendant of ancient civil- 
ization. How often have I myself written, 
that that degrading literature of the last cen- 
tury flowed from the corruptions of an abso- 
lute monarchy ! And now Liberty, as if to 
turn into derision my worship at its altars, has 
taken for its model the school of Louis XV., 
and improved upon its infamous inspirations." 
—Pp. 408, 409. 

This revolutionary torrent has broken into 
every department ; it has invaded the opinions 
of the thoughtful, the manners of the active, 
the morals of the young, and the sanctity of 
families. The fatal doctrine of a general di- 
vision of property, is spreading to an extent 
hardly conceivable in a state possessing much 
property, and great individual ability. 

" When the spirit of disorder has thus taken 
possession of all imaginations, when the revolu- 
tionary herald knocks with redoubled strokes, 
not only at all the institutions, but at all the 
doctrines and opinions which hold together 
the fabric of society, can property, the corner- 
stone of the edifice, be respected] Let us not 
flatter ourselves with the hope that it can. 

" Property has already ceased to be the main 
pillar of the social constitution. It is treated 
as conquered by the laws, as an enemy by the 
politicians. Should the present system con- 
tinue, it will soon become a slave." — P. 416. 

" The proof that the revolutionary torrent 
has overwhelmed us, and that we are about to 
retrograde for several centuries, is, that the 
principle of confiscation is maintained without 
intermission, without exciting any horror. An 
able young man, M. Lherminier, has lately ad- 
vanced the doctrine, that society is entitled to 
dispossess the minority, to make way for the 
majority. Well, a learned professor of the 
law has advanced this doctrine, and France 
hears it without surprise. Nay, farther, we 
have a public worship, an hierarchy, mission- 
aries — in fine, a whole corps of militia, who 
go from town to town, incessantly preaching 
to the people the necessity of overturning the 
hereditary descent of property ; and that scan- 
dalous offence is openly tolerated. The state 
permits a furious association to be formed in 
its very bosom, to divide the property of 
others ! Yet more — the French society as- 
sists at that systematic destruction of its last 
pillar, as it would at a public game. Lyons 
even cannot rouse them to their danger, — the 
conflagration of the second city in the empire 
fails to illuminate the public thought." — 
Pp. 418, 419. 

In the midst of this universal fusion of pub- 



lic thought in the revolutionary crucible, the 
sway of religion, of private morality, and pa- 
rental authority, could not long be expected to 
survive. They have all accordingly given 
way. 

" Possibly the revolutionary worship has 
come in place of the service of the altar, 
which has been destroyed. Every religious tie 
has long been extinguished amongst us. But now, 
even its semblance has been abandoned. A Cham- 
ber which boasts of having established free- 
dom, has seriously entertained a project for 
the abolition of the Sunday, and all religious 
festivals. That would be the most complete 
of all reactions, for it would at once confound 
all ages, and exterminate every chance of sal- 
vation. 

" Such is the estimation in which religion is 
now held, that every one hastens to clear him- 
self from the odious aspersion of being in the least 
degree attached to it. The representatives in 
parliament, if by any chance an allusion is 
made to the clergy, burst out into laughter or 
sneer; they think they can govern a people, 
while they are incessantly outraging their 
worship — that cradle of modern civilization. 
If a journal accidentally mentions that a regi- 
ment has attended mass, all the generals in 
the kingdom hasten to repel the calumny, to 
protest by all that is sacred their entire inno- 
cence, to swear that the barricades have taught 
them to forget the lessons of Napoleon, to bow 
the knee at the name of God." — P. 420. 

"In this universal struggle for disorganiza- 
tion, the fatal ardour gains every character. 
The contest is, who shall demolish most effec- 
tually, and give the most vehement strokes to 
society. M. de Schonen sees well that less 
good was done by his courage in resisting the 
attacks on the temples of religion, than evil 
by the weight lent by the proposition for di- 
vorce, to the last establishment which was yet 
untouched, the sanctity of private life. To 
defend our public monuments, and overturn 
marriage, is a proceeding wholly for the bene- 
fit of anarchy; I say overturn it; for in the 
corrupted state of society where we live, to 
dissolve its indissolubility, is to strike it in its 
very essence." — Pp. 412, 413. 

" The recent Revolution has exhibited a 
spectacle which was wanting in that of 1789. 
Robespierre, in the Constituent Assembly, pro- 
posed the abolition of the punishment of death : 
no one then thought of death, none dreamed 
of bathing themselves in blood. Now, the 
case is widely different — we have arrived at 
terror at one leap. It is while knowing it, 
while viewing it full in the face, that it is se- 
riously recommended. We have, or we affect, 
the unhappy passion for blood. The speeches 
of Robespierre and St. Just are printed and 
sold for a few sous, leaving out only his speech in 
favour of the Supreme Being. All this goes on 
in peaceable times, when we are all as yet in 
cold blood, without the double excuse of terror 
and passion which palliated their enormities 
— Poetry has taken the same line. The Consti- 
tutionel, while publishing their revolting pane- 
gyrics on blood, expresses no horror at this 
tendency. Incessantly we are told the reign 
of blood cannot be renewed; but our days 



320 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



have done more, they have removed all horror 
at it."— P. 421. 

On the dissolution of the hereditary peerage, 
the great conquest of the Revolution, the fol- 
lowing striking observations are made. 

"The democrats, in speaking of the destruc- 
tion of the hereditary peerage, imagine that 
they have only sacrificed an institution. 
There never was a more grievous mistake ; 
they have destroyed a principle. They have 
thrown into the gulf the sole conservative 
principle that the Revolution had left; the 
sole stone in the edifice which recalls the 
past; the sole force in the constitution which 
subsists of itself. By that great stroke, France 
has violently detached itself from the Euro- 
pean continent, violently thrown itself beyond 
the Atlantic, violently married itself to the 
virgin soil of Pennsylvania, whither we bring 
an ancient, discontented, and divided society; 
a population overflowing, which, having no 
deserts to expand over, must recoil upon it- 
self, and tear out its own entrails ; in fine, the 
tastes of servitude, the appetite for domina- 
tion and anarchy, anti-religious doctrines, anti- 
social passions, at which that young state, 
which bore Washington, nourished freedom, 
and believes in God, would stand aghast. 

" The middling rank has this evil inherent 
in its composition ; placed on the confines of 
physical struggle, the intervention of force 
does not surprise it ; it submits to its tyranny 
without revolt. Has it defended France, for 
the last sixteen months, from the leaden scep- 
tre which has so cruelly weighed upon her 
destinies ] What a spectacle was exhibited 
when the Chamber of Peers, resplendent with 
talent, with virtues, with recollections dear to 
France, by its conscientious votes for so many 
years, was forced to vote against its conviction ; 
forced, I say, to bend its powerful head before a 
brutal, jealous, and ignorant multitude. The class 
which could command such a sacrifice, en- 
force such a national humiliation, is incapable 
of governing France ; and will never preserve 
the empire, but suffer it to fall into the jaws 
of the pitiless enemy, who is ever ready to 
devour it." — P. 487. 

" No government is possible, where the mor- 
tal antipathy exists, which in France alienates 
the lower classes in possession of power from 
the ascendant of education or fortune. Can 
any one believe that power will ultimately re- 
main in the hands of that intermediate class 
which is detached from the interests of pro- 
perty, without being allied to the multitude 1 
Is it not evident, that its natural tendency is to 
separate itself daily more and more from the 
first class, to unite itself to the second 1 Com- 
munity of hatred will occasion unity of exer- 
tion ; and the more that the abyss is enlarged 
which separates the present depositaries of 
power from its natural possessors, the more 
will the masses enter into a share, and finally 
the exclusive possession, of power. Thence 
it will proceed from demolition to demolition, 
from disorder to disorder, by an inevitable pro- 
gress, and must at length end in the anti-social 
state, the rule of the multitude. 

" The moment that the opinion of the domi- 
nant classes disregards established interests, that 



it takes a pleasure in violating those august 
principles which constitute the soul of society, 
we see an abyss begin to open; the earth 
quakes beneath our feet — the community is 
shaken to its very entrails. Then begins a pro- 
found and universal sense of suffering. Capital 
disappears : talents retreat — become irritated 
or corrupted. The national genius becomes 
intoxicated — precipitates itself into every 
species of disorder, and bears aloft, not as a 
light, but a torch of conflagration, its useless 
flame. The whole nation is seized with dis- 
quietude and sickness, as on the eve of those 
convulsions which shake the earth, and trouble 
at once the air, the earth, and the sea. Every 
one seeks the causes of this extraordinary 
state; it is to be found in one alone — the social 
state is trembling to its foundations. 

" This is precisely the state we have been in 
for sixteen months. To conceal it is impossi- 
ble. What is required is to endeavour to 
remedy its disorders. France is well aware 
that it would be happy if it had only lost a fifth 
of its immense capital during that period. Every 
individual in the kingdom has lost a large portion 
of his income. And yet the Revolution of 1830 
was the most rapid and the least bloody re- 
corded in history. If we look nearer, we shall 
discover that every one of us is less secure of 
his property than he was before that moral 
earthquake. Every one is less secure of his 
head, though the reign of death has not yet 
commenced; and in that universal feeling of 
insecurity is to be found the source of the uni- 
versal suffering." — II. 491. 

But we must conclude, however reluctantly, 
these copious extracts. Were we to translate 
every passage which is striking in itself, 
which bears in the most extraordinary way on 
the present crisis in this country, we should 
transcribe the whole of this eloquent and pro- 
found disquisition. If it had been written in 
this country, it would have been set down as 
the work of some furious anti-reformer ; of 
some violent Tory, blind to the progress of 
events, insensible to the change of society. It 
is the work, however, of no anti-reformer, but 
of a liberal Parisian historian, a decided sup- 
porter at the time of the Revolution of July; a 
powerful opponent of the Bourbons for fifteen 
years in the Chamber of Deputies. He is 
commended in the highest terms by Lady 
Morgan, as one of the rising lights of the 
age ;* and that stamps his character as a 
leader of the liberal party. But he has become 
enlightened, as all the world will be, to the 
real tendency of the revolutionary spirit, by 
that most certain of all preceptors, the suffer- 
ing it has occasioned. 

Salvandy, like all the liberal party in France, 
while he clearly perceives the deplorable state 
to which their Revolution has brought them, 
and the fatal tendency of the democratic spirit 
which the triumph of July has so strongly de- 
veloped, is unable to discover the remote 
cause of the disasters which overwhelm them. 
At this distance from the scene of action, we 
can clearly discern it. " Ephraim," says the 
Scripture, "has gone to his idols; let him 



* France, ii. 342. 



DESERTION OF PORTUGAL. 



321 



alone." In these words is to be found the 
secret of the universal suffering, the deplora- 
ble condition, the merciless tyranny, which 
prevails in France. It is labouring under the 
chastisement of Heaven. An offended Deity 
has rained down upon it a worse scourge than 
the brimstone which destroyed the cities of the 
Jordan — the scourge of its own passions and 
vices. The terrible cruelty of the Reign of Ter- 
ror — the enormous injustice of the revolution- 
ary rule, is registered in the book of fate ; the 
universal abandonment of religion by all the 
influential classes, has led to the extirpation 
of all the barriers against anarchy which are 
fitted to secure the well-being of society. Its 
fate is sealed; its glories are gone; the un- 
fettered march of passion will overthrow 
every public and private virtue ; and national 
ruin will be the consequence. We are follow- 
ing in the same course, and will most certainly 
share in the same punishment. 

In this melancholy prospect let us be thank- 
ful that the conservative party have nothing 
with which to reproach themselves ; that 
though doomed to share in the punishment, 
they are entirely guiltless of the crime. Noble 
indeed as was the conduct of the Duke of 



Wellington, in coming forward at the eleventh 
hour, to extricate the crown from the perilous 
situation in which it was placed, and the de- 
grading thraldom to which it was subjected, 
we rejoice, from the bottom of our hearts, that 
the attempt was frustrated. Had he gone on 
with the bill as it stood, from a sense of 
overwhelming necessity, all its consequences 
would have been laid on its opponents. The 
Whigs brought in the Reform Bill — let them 
have the dreadful celebrity of carrying it 
through. Let them inscribe on their banners 
the overthrow of the constitution; let them go 
down to posterity as the destroyers of a cen- 
tury and a half of glory; let them be stigma- 
tized in the page of history as the men who 
overthrew the liberties of England. Never 
despairing of their country, let the great and 
noble Conservative party stand aloof from the 
fatal career of revolution ; let them remain for 
ever excluded from power, rather than gain it 
by the sacrifice of one iota of principle ; and 
steadily resisting the march of wickedness, and 
all the allurements of ambition, take for their 
motto the words of ancient duty, l, Fais ce que 
dois: advienne ce que pourra." 



DESERTION OF PORTUGAL.* 



Lightly as in a moment of political frenzy, 
and under the influence of the passion for 
innovation, we may speak of the wisdom of 
our ancestors, their measures were founded on 
considerations which will survive the tempest 
of the present times. They arose not from any 
sagacity in them superior to what we possess, 
but from experience having forced upon them 
prudent measures from the pressure of ne- 
cessity. As France is the power which had 
been found by experience to be most formida- 
ble to the liberties of Europe, and in an espe- 
cial manner perilous to the independence of 
England, our policy for two hundred years has 
been founded upon the principle, that Holland 
on the one side, and Portugal on the other, 
should be supported against it. By a close 
alliance with these two powers, we extended 
our arms, as it were, around our powerful 
neighbour; she could not go far in any direc- 
tion without encountering either the one or the 
other. So strongly was the necessity of this 
felt, that so far back as 1663, in the treaty 
concluded with Portugal, it was stipulated 
" that England should resent any insult or ag- 
gression offered to Portugal in the same way, 
and with the same power as if its own domi- 
nions were invaded." 

The result has proved the wisdom of their 
stipulations. In the two greatest wars which 
have distracted Europe for the last two centu- 
ries, the Netherlands and the Peninsula have 
been the theatre where the armies of France 
and England have encountered each other. 



* Blackwood's Magazine, December, 1831. 
41 



France has never been effectually checked bu5 
when assailed in Spain and Flanders. Five- 
and-twenty years' peace followed the treaty of 
Utrecht, and sixteen have already followed the 
peace of Paris. All other treaties for the last 
hundred and fifty years can only be considered 
as truces in comparison. Such is the import- 
ance of the Peninsula, that a considerable 
success there is almost sufficient to neutralize 
the greatest advantages in the central parts of 
Europe ; the victory of Almanza had well nigh 
neutralized the triumphs of Oudenarde, Ra- 
millies, and Malplaquet, and the cannon of 
Salamanca startled Napoleon even on the eve 
of the carnage of Borodino, and when almost 
within sight of the Kremlin. 

" The sea," says General Jomini, " which is 
the worst possible base to every power, is 
the best to England. That which is but a 
sterile and inhospitable desert to a military 
power, conveys to the menaced point the 
fleets and the forces of Albion." It is on this 
principle, that the strict alliance and close 
connection with Portugal was formed. Its ex- 
tensive sea-coast, mountainous ridges, and 
numerous harbours, afforded the utmost faci- 
lities for pouring into its bosom the resources 
and armies of England, while its own force 
was not so considerable as to render its people 
jealous of the protection, or averse to the 
generals, of England. The result proved the 
wisdom of the choice made of Portugal as the 
fulcrum on which the military power of Eng- 
land, when engaged in continental war, should 
be rested. It is there alone that an uncon- 
querable stand was made against the forces of 



322 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Napoleon. That which neither the firmness 
of Austria, nor the valour of Prussia, nor the 
power of Russia could accomplish, has been 
achieved by this little state, backed by the 
might and the energy of England. Austria 
has to lament the defects of Ulm and Wagram ; 
Prussia the overthrow of Jena; Russia the 
catastrophes of Austerlitz and Friedland ; 
but the career of Portugal, in the same terrible 
strife, was one of uninterrupted success ; be- 
fore the rocks of Torres Vedras, the waves of 
Gallic aggression first permanently receded ; 
and from the strongholds of the Tagus, the 
British standards advanced to a career of glory 
greater than ever graced the days of her Hen- 
rys and her Edwards. 

It is a point on which military men are at 
variance, whether fortresses are of more value 
on the frontier or in the centre of a menaced 
state. Perhaps the question may be solved by 
a distinction : — where the state assailed is one 
of firstrate importance, as France or Austria, 
fortified towns on its frontier are of incalcula- 
ble importance, because, if the invading army 
stops to invest them, it gives time for great 
armaments in the interior; if it pushes on and 
neglects them, it necessarily becomes so weak- 
ened by the detachments made for the purpose 
of maintaining their blockade, that it is inca- 
pable of achieving any considerable success. 
Two memorable examples of this occurred in 
French Flanders in 1793, when the invading 
army, an hundred and twenty thousand strong, 
was so long delayed by besieging the frontier 
fortresses of Valenciennes, Conde, Maubeuge, 
and Landrecy, that time was given for the 
Convention to organize and equip the great 
armaments in the interior, which finally re- 
pelled the invasion ; and in Lombardy, in 1796, 
when the single fortress of Mantua arrested 
the career of Napoleon for six months, and 
gave time for Austria to assemble no less than 
four successive and powerful armies for its 
relief. On the other hand, the extraordinary 
advantage attending the great central fortifica- 
tions of Wellington at Torres Vedras, and the 
corresponding successes gained by Skrzynecki, 
from the possession of Warsaw, Zamosc, and 
Modlin, during the late Polish war, and by 
Napoleon, from the fortresses of Dresden, 
Torgau, and Wittemberg, on the Elbe, in 1813, 
•demonstrate, that where the state assailed is 
more inconsiderable when compared to the 
attacking force, fortifications are of more avail 
when placed in the centre of the threatened 
state, and when its armies, retiring upon their 
central strongholds, find both a point d'appui in 
case of disaster, and an interior line of com- 
munication, which compensates inferiority of 
forces, and affords an opportunity for accumu- 
lating masses on detached bodies of the 
enemy. 

But his majesty's present government have 
solved the question in a totally different man- 
ner. They have relinquished both the frontier 
and the central fortresses which bridled 
France ; both those which checked its irrup- 
tion into the centre of Europe, and those which 
afforded a secure and central position on which 
the armies of England could combat when 
matters became more serious. We have lost 



both the frontier barrier of Marlborough in 
Flanders, and the interior barrier of Welling- 
ton in Portugal ; with one hand we have aban- 
doned the safeguard of northern, with the other 
the citadel of southern Europe. 

Deviating for the first time from the policy 
of two hundred years, we have not only loaded 
Portugal with injuries and indignities our- 
selves, but we have permitted her to be the 
victim of revolutionary violence and rapine 
on the part of France. The Portuguese 
wines, long the favoured object of British 
protection, have been abandoned; the duties 
of French and Oporto wines have been equal- 
ized, and our ancient and irreconcilable ene- 
my placed on the footing of the most favoured 
nation ! 

The consequence of this must in time be 
the destruction or serious injury of the im- 
mense capital invested in the raising of port 
wine on the banks of the Douro. The cultiva- 
tion of wine there has been nursed up by a 
century's protection, and brought to its pre- 
sent flourishing state by the fostering influence 
of the British market. But how is that exces- 
sive and exotic state of cultivation to continue, 
when the duties on Portuguese and French 
wines are equalized, and the merchants of 
Bordeaux can, from a shorter distance, send 
wines adapted to the English taste from the 
mouth of the Garonne ? Two shillings a gal- 
lon has been taken off French, and as much 
laid on Portuguese wines ; the Portuguese 
grower, therefore, in competition with the 
French, finds himself saddled with a difference 
of duty amounting to four shillings a gallon. 
It requires no argument to show that such a 
difference of taxation deprives the Portuguese 
of all their former advantages, and must in 
the end extinguish the extraordinary growth 
of vines in the province of Entre Douro 
Minho. 

What are the advantages which ministers 
propose to themselves from this abandonment 
of their ancient ally ? Is it that the English 
commerce with France is so much more con- 
siderable than that of Portugal, that it is worth 
while to lose the one in order to gain the 
other] The reverse is the fact — the British 
exports to France are only 700,000/. a year, 
while those to Portugal amount to 2,000,000/. 
Is it that France has done so much more for 
British commerce than Portugal ? The re- 
verse is the fact — France has, by the most 
rigid system of prohibitions, excluded all Bri- 
tish manufactures from its shores ; while Por- 
tugal has, by a series of the most favourable 
treaties, given them the greatest possible en- 
couragement. Is it because a more extend- 
ed commerce with France may in future be 
anticipated from the friendly intercourse be- 
tween the two countries, and a spirit of rising 
liberality has manifested itself on the part of 
its manufacturers and merchants ? The re- 
verse is the fact. France, so nearly in its 
northern parts in the same latitude with Eng- 
land, has the same coal, the same steam-en- 
gines, the same manufactures, whereas Portu- 
gal, exposed to the influence of a vertical sun, 
without coal or manufacturing capital, is 
unable to compete with any of the produc- 



DESERTION OF PORTUGAL. 



tions of British industry. The consequence 
is, that the utmost possible jealousy has al- 
ways, and especially of late years, existed on 
the part of the French against the British 
manufactures ; and that all our measures for 
their encouragement have been met by in- 
creased duties, and more rigid prohibitions of 
the produce of our industry. Is it because 
France has been so much more friendly, of 
late years, to Britain than Portugal 1 The 
reverse is the fact. France has, for three 
centuries, done every thing she possibly 
could to destroy our industry and our inde- 
pendence, while Portugal has done every 
thing in her power to support the one and 
the other. 

The reason of this difference in the con- 
duct of the two states, is founded in the dif- 
ference of the physical situation of the two 
countries, and of their climate and produce. 
Portugal, the country of the vine and the 
olive, without coal, wood, or fabrics of any 
sort, destitute of canals or carriage-roads, 
intersected by immense mountain ridges, is 
as incapable of competing with the fabrics 
or manufactures of England, as England is 
of emulating their oil, fruit, and wines. The 
case might have been the same with France, 
if it had been possessed merely by its south- 
ern provinces ; but the northern lying nearly 
in the same latitude as England, with their 
coal mines, cotton and iron manufactories, 
are in exactly the same line of industry as 
the British counties, and their jealousy in 
consequence of our manufactures is exces- 
sive. The manufacturers of Rouen and Ly- 
ons, being a much more opulent and united 
body than the peasant vine-growers of the 
south, have got the entire control of govern- 
ment, and hence the extraordinary rigour 
with which they exclude our manufactures, 
and the inconsiderable amount of the trade 
which we carry on with that populous king- 
dom. This jealousy, being founded on simi- 
larity of industry, and the rivalry of the same 
kind of manufactures, will continue to the end 
of time. By encouraging the wines of France, 
therefore, we are favouring the industry of a 
country which has not only always been our 
enemy, but never will make any return in 
facilitating the consumption of our manufac- 
tures ! By encouraging the wines of Portugal, 
we are fostering the industry of a country 
which has always been our friend; and, from 
the absence of all manufacturing jealousy, 
may be relied upon as likely to continue per- 
manently to take off the greatest possible 
amount of our manufactures. 

But this is not all. Not content with in- 
flicting this severe blow upon the industry of 
an allied state, which takes of 2,000,000/. a 
year of our produce, and is so likely to con- 
tinue to do so, we have insulted and injured 
Portugal in the tenderest point, and allowed 
our new ally, revolutionary France, to destroy 
her national independence, and extinguish all 
recollection of the protection and the guardian- 
ship of England. 

Don Miguel, as everybody knows, is de 
facto, if not de jure, king of Portugal. He is 
not a legitimate monarch ; he stands upon the 



people's choice. We do not pretend to vindi- 
cate either his character or his system of go- 
vernment. They are both said to be bad, 
though, from the falsehood on this subject 
which evidently pervades the English press, 
and the firm support which the Portuguese 
have given him when under the ban of all 
Europe, there is every reason to believe that 
the accounts we receive are grossly exagge- 
rated: but of that we have no authentic ac- 
counts. Suffice it to say, the Portuguese have 
chosen him for their sovereign, and, after the 
experience of both, prefer an absolute monar- 
chy to the democratic constitution with which 
they were visited from this country. Now, 
our government is avowedly founded on the 
system of non-intervention; and when the 
French and Belgians made choice of a revo- 
lutionary monarch, we were not slow in snap- 
ping asunder all treaties with the expelled 
dynasty, and recognising the new monarch 
whom they placed on the throne. Don Miguel 
has now held for four years the Portuguese 
sceptre ; his throne is more firmly established 
than that of either Louis Philippe or Leopold. 
He has received neither countenance nor aid 
from any foreign power; and if he had not 
been agreeable to the great bulk of the Portu- 
guese, he must, long ere this, have ceased to 
reign. On what ground, then, is the recogni- 
tion of Don Miguel so long delayed 1 Why is 
he driven into a course of irregular and des- 
perate conduct, from the refusal of the Eu- 
ropean powers to admit his title? If they 
acted on the principle of never recognising 
any one but the legitimate monarch, we could 
understand the consistency of their conduct; 
but after having made such haste to recognise 
the revolutionary monarchs, it is utterly im- 
possible to discover any ground on which we 
can withhold the same homage to the absolute 
one, or refuse the same liberty of election to 
the Portuguese which we have given to the 
French and Belgian people. 

But this is not all — France has committed 
an act of the most lawless and violent kind 
to the Portuguese government; and we have 
not only done nothing to check, but every thing 
to encourage it. 

Two Frenchmen were arrested, it is said, for 
political offences in Portugal, and sentenced to 
pay a heavy fine by the courts there. What they 
had done we know not. The Portuguese say 
they were endeavouring to effect a revolution 
in that country — the French deny the fact, and 
assert that they were unjustly condemned. 
However that may be, the French fleet sailed 
to the Tagus, forced the passage of the forts, 
and took possession of the fleet without any 
declaration of war. They required the re- 
versal of the sentence against their condemned 
countrymen, the payment of a large sum in 
name of damages to them, and a public apo- 
logy ; and having gained all these objects, they 
carried off the Portuguese fleet along with them to 
France, while their ambassador still remained 
on a pacific footing at the court of Lisbon ! 
Now, this was plainly an act of rapine and 
piracy. Without entering into the justice or 
injustice of the proceedings against the ac- 
cused in the Portuguese courts, supposing tha' 



324 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



they were as unjustifiable as possible, is that 
any ground for seizing the whole navy of Por- 
tugal, after the sentence complained of had 
been reversed, ample satisfaction made to the 
injured party, and a public apology placarded 
on the streets of Lisbon by the Portuguese 
government 1 

Against this flagrant kind of revolutionary 
violence, England has neither protested nor 
demonstrated: — we have witnessed in silence 
the spoliation of the Portuguese fleet, as the 
partition of the Dutch territory, and France 
can boast of greater naval trophies obtained 
from the allies of England in peace, than she 
ever obtained during the twenty years of the 
revolutionary war. Injuries are often com- 
plained of by the subjects of one country 
against the government of another ; satisfac- 
tion is often demanded and obtained, and da- 
mages awarded to the aggrieved party. But 
was it ever heard of before, that after such 
satisfaction had been obtained, the tohole fleet 
of the power from whom it was demanded 
should be seized hold of, and carried off as in 
open war 1 If this is a specimen of revolu- 
tionary justice, and of the new eras of liberty 
and equality, certainly Astrsea in leaving the 
world has not left her last footsteps among 
them. 

In this iniquitous and violent proceeding 
towards our old and faithful ally, let it always 
be recollected, the English government has 
tamely acquiesced. Well might the Duke of 
Wellington declare in the House of Lords, 
that nothing in life had ever given him so 
much pain, and that his cheeks were filled 
with blushes, when he thought of the conduct 
of our government towards its ancient ally. 
Would the government of Louis Philippe, we 
ask, have ventured upon such a step, if the 
Duke of Wellington had been at the head of 
our administration 1 Would they have ven- 
tured on it, if they had not been aware that no 
violence of theirs towards the Portuguese go- 
vernment was likely to be resented by our re- 
forming government 1 In what light are we 
likely to be viewed by posterity, when, after 
having made such heroic efforts to save the 
Portuguese from the yoke of France, for eight 
years during the reign of Napoleon, we suffer 
them to become the victims of such revolu- 
tionary violence, the moment that a new ad- 
ministration is called to the helm of affairs'? 

How can we expect that our allies are to 
stand by us in periods of peril, when we de- 
sert them in so extraordinary a manner the 
moment that a new administration succeeds 
to our guidance 1 Have we arrived at that 
state of vacillation and instability, so well 
known as the symptom of weak and demo- 
cratic societies, that there is nothing stable 
or fixed either in foreign or domestic policy, 
but government is tossed about by every wind 
df doctrine, and at the mercy of every agita- 
tion raised from the lowest classes of the peo- 
ple 1 Have the reformers brought this country, 
whose firmness and stability in time past had 
rivalled that of the Roman senate, to such a 
state of weakness in so short a time, that the 
British alliance forms no security against ex- 
ternal violence, and every state that wishes to 



avoid plunder and devastation, must range it- 
self under the banners of our enemies 1 What 
the motive for such conduct may have been, 
it is difficult to divine; but the fact is certain, 
that we have done so, and every Englishman 
must bear the humiliation which it has brought 
upon his country. 

" The meanest Englishman," said Mr. Can- 
ning, "shall not walk the streets of Paris with- 
out being considered as the compatriot of 
Wellington ; as a member of that community 
which has humbled France and rescued Eu- 
rope." The noblest Englishman shall not now 
walk the streets of any European capital, with- 
out being considered as the compatriot of Grey ; 
the member of that community which has par- 
titioned Holland and deserted Portugal. With 
truth it may now be said, that the indignities 
and contempt which now await a traveller 
among all our former allies, are equalled only 
by the respect which he formerly experienced. 
Ask any traveller who has lately returned from 
Vienne, Berlin, the Hague, or Lisbon, in what 
light he is now regarded ; whether he has ex- 
perienced the same kindness or respect which 
so lately attended the English character? He 
will answer that they consider the English as 
absolutely insane, and that the ancient respect 
for our people is not quite extinguished, only 
because they look upon our delirium as tran- 
sient, and trust to the restoration of the ancient 
spirit of the nation. 

It is impossible it can be otherwise. To see 
a people suddenly relinquish all their former 
allies, and connect themselves with their an- 
cient enemies — abandon at one blow the ob- 
jects of two hundred years' contest, and forget 
in one year the gratitude and the obligations 
of centuries — is so extraordinary, that to those 
at a distance from the innovating passions 
with which we have been assailed, it must ap- 
pear like the proceedings of men who had lost 
their reason. Such a proceeding might be in- 
telligible, if experience had proved that this 
former policy had been ruinous ; that these 
ancient allies had proved unfaithful ; that these 
hereditary obligations had been a source of 
humiliation. But what is to be said when the 
reverse of all this is the fact ? when this policy 
had been attended with unprecedented tri- 
umphs, these allies having stood by us in the 
extremity of disaster, and these obligations 
having brought with them a weight of national 
gratitude] when the Dutch remind England 
that it was not till Pichegru had conquered 
Amsterdam that they withdrew unwillingly 
from their alliance ; and the Portuguese re- 
count that they remained faithful to their en- 
gagements, when the spoiler was ravaging their 
land; when the army of England had fled from 
Corunna ; when Oporto was in the hands of 
Soult; when a devouring flame ravaged their 
central provinces, and the leopards of England 
were driven to their last defences on the rocks 
of Mafra? 

The French accuse their government of 
yielding too much to British ascendency; and 
it may be judged from the preceding state- 
ments whether we are not too obsequious to 
their revolutionary rulers. The truth is, that 
both charges are well founded. The govern- 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



325 



ments of both countries appear to play into 
each other's hands, to an extent inconsistent 
with the honour or the welfare of either. When 
the revolutionary dynasty of France deem an 
advance into Belgium, or an assault on Por- 
tugal, requisite to give an impulse to their de- 
clining popularity, the reforming ministers of 
England offer no opposition to the spoliation 
of their allies. If the reforming ministers 
here deem their situation critical, by a formi- 
dable opposition to the projected change in the 
constitution, the French troops are directed to 
withdraw from Belgium — to encamp on the 
frontier — and preserve their advanced guard, 
consisting of the Belgian army, led by French 
officers alone, in the fortresses of Flanders. 
We ascribe no bad motives to our rulers ; we 
have no doubt that they think they are per- 
forming the part of true patriots: we mention 
only the facts which have occurred, and pos- 
terity will judge of these facts with inflexible 
justice — nor excuse weakness of conduct, be- 



cause it is founded on goodness of inten- 
tion. 

There can be no doubt that the conduct we 
have explained on the part of our present 
rulers towards Flanders and Portugal, would 
have been sufficient to have overturned any 
former administration — and that at any other 
time, the press of England would have rung 
from shore to shore with indignant declama- 
tion at the inconsistency and imbecility of our 
present foreign policy. How, then, has it 
happened, that this important matter is com- 
paratively forgotten, and that we hear so little 
of a course of conduct which future ages will 
class with the fatal aberration from British 
policy by Charles II. 1 The reason is, that we 
are overwhelmed with domestic disasters, — 
that revolution and anarchy are staring us in 
the face at home, — and that seeing the danger 
at our own throats, we have neither leisure 
nor inclination to attend to the circumstances 
or disasters of our allies. 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.* 



Amidst all our declarations in favour of the 
lights of the age, the influence of the press, 
and the extension of journals in diffusing 
correct ideas on every subject of policy, fo- 
reign and domestic, it may be doubted, whether 
there is to be found in the whole history of 
human delusion, not even excepting the be- 
nighted ages of papal despotism, or the equally 
dark era of Napoleon's tyranny, an example 
of ignorance so complete and general, as has 
prevailed in this country, for the last seven 
years, as to the affairs of Spain. While a 
contest has been going on there during all that 
period between constitutional right and revolu- 
tionary spoliation; while the Peninsula has 
been convulsed by the long protracted con- 
flict between legal government and democratic 
despotism ; while the same cause which has 
been supported since 1830 in Great Britain by 
the arms of reasoning, eloquence, or influence, 
has there been carried on with the edge of the 
sword ; while for the last four years a struggle 
has been maintained by the Basque moun- 
taineers for their rights and their liberties, 
their hearths and their religion, which history 
will place beside the glories of Marathon and 
Salamis, of Naefels and Morgarten ; while an 
heroic prince and his heroic brothers have 
borne up against a load of oppression, foreign 
and domestic, in defence of legal right and con- 
stitutional freedom, with a courage and a skill 
rarely paralleled in the annals of military 
achievement, the great bulk of the English 
nation have looked with supineness or indiffer- 
ence on the glorious spectacle. They have 
been deceived, and willingly deceived, by the 
endless falsehoods which the revolutionary 

♦ Blackwood's Magazine, May, 1837. Written during the 
heroic contest of the Basque provinces for their liberty 
and independence. 



press and the holders of Spanish bonds spread 
abroad on this subject ; they have been carried 
away by the false and slanderous appellations 
bestowed on Don Carlos; they have been 
mystified by a denial of his clear and irresisti- 
ble title to the throne ; they have not duly con- 
sidered the stern and inexorable necessity which 
compelled him to abandon the humane system 
of warfare which he at first adopted, and re- 
taliate upon his enemies the atrocious and 
murderous rule of war which they had so long 
practised against him and his followers; and 
by their supineness permitted the royal arms 
of England to be implicated in the most savage 
crusade ever undertaken in modern times 
against the liberty of mankind, and a band of 
brave but deluded mercenaries, to prolong to 
their own and their country's eternal disgrace 
a frightful conflict between sordid democratic 
despotism, striving to elevate itself on the ruins 
of its country, and the free-born bravery of un- 
conquerable patriots. 

We take blame to ourselves on this subject; 
we confess ourselves implicated in the charge 
which, through all the succeeding ages of the 
world, will attach to the name of England, for 
its deplorable concern in this heroic conflict, 
which will go far to obliterate the recollection 
of all its memorable exertions in the cause of 
freedom. The calamity is not the defeat sus- 
tained at St. Sebastian or Hernani : not the 
disgrace of English regiments being routed 
and driven back at the point of the bayonet in 
shameful confusion; these stains are easily 
wiped out : the national courage, when brought 
into the field in a just cause, will soon obliter 
ate the recollection of the defeat which was 
sustained in supporting that of cruelty and in- 
justice. The real disgrace— the calamity which 
England has indeed to mourn, is that of having 
2E 



326 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



joined in an alliance to beat down the liberties 
of mankind; in having aided a selfish, execra- 
ble band of Peninsula murderers and plunderers 
to oppress and massacre our faithful allies ; in 
having combined with France, in defiance 
alike of the faith of treaties and the rules of 
international law, to deprive a gallant prince 
of his rightful inheritance ; in having sent out 
the royal forces of England, under the old flag 
of Wellington, to aid a set of Spanish cut- 
throats and assassins, of robbers and plun- 
derers, *n carrying fire and sword, mourning 
and despair through the valleys of a simple 
and virtuous people, combined in no other 
cause but that for which Hampden bled on 
the field and Sidney on the scaffold. 

"Wo unto those," says the Scripture, "who 
call evil good and good evil ; for theirs is the 
greater damnation.'' It is in this fatal delusion 
— in the confusion of ideas produced by trans- 
posing the names of things, and calling the cause 
of despotism that of freedom, merely because 
it is supported by r urban despots — and that of 
freedom slavery, because it is upheld by rural 
patriots, that the true cause of this hideous 
perversion, not merely of national character, 
but even of party consistency, is to be found. 
We are perfectly persuaded that, if the people 
of England were aware of the real nature of 
the cause in which they embarked a gallant 
but unfortunate band of adventurers; if the 
government were aware of the real tendency 
of the quasi-intervention which they have 
carried on, both the one and the other would 
recoil with horror from the measures which 
they have so long sanctioned. But both were 
deluded by the name of freedom; both were 
carried away by the absurd mania for the ex- 
tension of democratic institutions into coun- 
tries wholly unprepared for them; and both 
thought they were upholding the cause of 
liberty and the ultimate interests of Great 
Britain, by supporting a band of Spanish Re- 
volutionists who have proved themselves to 
be the most selfish, corrupt, and despotic tyrants 
who ever yet rose to transient greatness upon 
the misery and degradation of their country. 
But, while we thus absolve the government 
and the country from intentional abuse of 
power in the deplorable transactions which 
both have sanctioned, there is a limit beyond 
which this forbearance cannot be extended. 

This result of our shameful intervention to 
oppress the free, and aid the murderers in 
massacring the innocent, is now fixed and un- 
alterable, and in no degree dependent on the 
future issue of the contest. What that may 
finally be, God only knows. It is possible, 
doubtless, that the weight of the Quadruple 
Alliance — the direct intervention of France — 
the insidious support of England — the exhaus- 
tion of a protracted contest — and the extirpa- 
tion of the population capable of bearing arms 
in the Basque provinces, may beat down these 
heroic mountaineers, and establish amidst 
blood and ashes, anguish and mourning, the 
cruel oppression of the Madrid democrats in 
the lovely valleys of Navarre: — " Qiuun soli- 
tudinem fecerunt, pacem appellant." In that 



thies, the indignant sympathies of mankind in 
every future age, will be with the unfortunate 
brave ; — like the Poles or the Girondists, the 
errors of their former conduct will all be for- 
gotten in the Roman heroism of their fall. 
They will take their place in history, beside 
their ancestors in Numantia and Saguntum, 
who preferred throwing themselves into the 
flames, to the hated dominion of the stranger; 
and the Saragossans or Geronists in later days, 
who perished in combating the formidable 
legions of Napoleon, or the gallant patriots, 
who, with Kosciusko, shed their last blood, 
when the grenadiers of Suwarrow were storm- 
ing the entrenchments of Prague, and the Vis- 
tula ran red with Polish blood. Or it may be, 
that Providence has reserved a different destiny 
for these gallant patriots, and that on this, as 
on so many previous occasions, the God of 
battles will bless the righteous side. In that 
case, their struggle will form one of the most 
animating periods in the page of history — one 
of the bright and consoling spots in the annals 
of human suffering, to which the patriot will 
point in every succeeding age as the animat- 
ing example of successful virtue, at the recital 
of which the hearts of the generous will throb, 
so long as valour and constancy shall be ap- 
preciated upon earth. 

We speak thus warmly, because we feel 
strongly — because we sympathize from the 
bottom of our hearts with the cause of free- 
dom all over the world. But we are not de- 
luded, as so many of our countrymen are, who 
never look beyond the surface of things, by the 
mere assumption of false names. We have 
learned from our own experience, as well as 
the annals of history, that tyranny, plunder, 
and oppression can stalk in the rear of the 
tricolour flag, and urban multitudes be roused 
by a ruthless band of sordid revolutionists, to 
their own and their country's ultimate ruin. 
We have learned also from the same sources 
of information, that hearts can beat as warmly 
for the cause of freedom, and arms combat as 
bravely in its defence on the mountain as on, 
the plain, in the sequestered valley as in the 
crowded city, under the banners of religion 
and loyalty, as under the standard of treason 
and perfidy. We yield to none in the ardent 
love of liberty ; but what we call liberty is the 
lasting protection of the rights and privileges 
of all classes of the people, not the trampling 
them under foot, to suit the fanciful theories 
of visionary enthusiasts, or the sordid specu- 
lations of stock exchange revolutionists. We 
look around us, and behold liberty still flour- 
ishing in the British isles, after a hundred and 
fifty years' duration, under the banner of reli- 
gion and loyalty, despite all the efforts of infi- 
del democracy for its destruction. We cast 
our eyes to the other side of the channel, and 
we see freedom perishing, both in France and 
Spain, after unheard-of calamities, under the 
ascendant of a revolutionary and freethinking 
generation. Taught by these great examples, 
we have learned to cling the more closely to 
the faith and the maxims of our fathers, to see 
in the principles of religion and loyalty the 



case, the interest of the struggle will be en- only secure foundation for real freedom; and 
hanced by its tragic termination ; the sympa- , to expect the ultimate triumph of constitu- 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



327 



tional principles, not from the sudden irrup- 
tion of blood-thirsty fanatics, or the selfish 
ambition of rapacious democrats, but the gra- 
dual and pacific growth of a middling class in 
society, under the protecting influence of a 
durable government. 

We make these remarks, too, in the full 
knowledge of the hideous massacres which 
have so long disfigured this unhappy war — 
having before our eyes the Duranga decree, 
and the Carlist executions ; and yielding to 
none in horror at these sanguinary atrocities, 
and the most ardent wish for their termination. 
We make them also, agreeing with the Stand- 
ard, that if this frightful system had begum, with 
the Carlists, or had even been adopted by them 
under the influence of any other cause than the 
sense of unbearable executions of a similar 
kind previously suffered by them, and begun by 
the Revolutionists, and the overwhelming ne- 
cessity of mournful retaliation, not only would 
their cause be unworthy of the sympathy of 
any brave or good man, but that Don Carlos 
himself would "be a monster unfit to live." 
But admitting all this, we see it as clearly 
proved as any proposition in geometry, that 
this execrable system began with the Spanish 
democrats, and them alone, and was never resort- 
ed to by the Carlists, till years after they had 
suffered under its atroiious execution by their ene- 
mies ; and the Carlist valleys were filled with 
mourning from the death of old men, women 
and children, murdered in cold blood by the 
democratic tyrants who sought to plunder and 
enslave them. And in such circumstances, 
we know that retaliation, however dreadful and 
mournful an extremity, is unavoidable, and that 
brave and humane men are forced, like Zuma- 
lacarregui, to sentence prisoners to be shot, 
even when the order, as it did from him, draws 
tears like rain from their eyes. Unquestion- 
ably none can admire more than we do the 
noble proclamation of the Duke of York in 
1793, in answer to the savage orders of the 
Directory to the Revolutionary armies of 
France to give no quarter. None can feel 
greater exultation at the humane conduct of 
the Vendeans, who, in reply to a similar order 
from their inhuman oppressors, sent eleven 
thousand prisoners back, with their heads 
merely shaved, to the republican lines. But it 
belongs to the prosperous and the secure to 
act upon such generous and noble principles ; 
— the endurance of cold-blooded cruelty, the 
pangs of murdered innocence, the sight of pa- 
rents and children slaughtered, will drive, and 
in every age have driven, the most mild and 
humane to the dreadful but unavoidable sys- 
tem of retaliation. 

We know that the Vendeans themselves, 
despite all the heroic humanity of their chiefs, 
were forced in the end to retaliate upon their 
enemies the system of giving no quarter. We 
know that Charette, the most humane of men 
in the outset of his heroic career, for the two 
last years of his career, found it impossible to 
act on any other principle. We go back to 
the annals of our own country, and we see in 
them too melancholy proof, that even in the 
sober-minded, or, it may be, right thinking in- 
habitants of the British isles, a certain endur- 



ance of suffering, and the commencement of a 
cruel system of war by one party, will at all 
limes drive their antagonists into a hideous 
course of reprisals. Have we forgotten, that 
in the wars of the Roses, quarter was refused, 
on both sides by the contending armies, for 
nine long years; and that eighty princes of the 
blood, and almost all the nobility of England 
were put to death, and most of them in cold 
blood, by the ruthless cruelty of English 
armies ! Have we forgotten, that utter de- 
struction was vowed by the Scottish Cove- 
nanters against the Irish auxiliaries in Mon- 
trose's army; and that they carried their ven- 
geance so far, as to massacre all their prison- 
ers in cold blood, and drown at the bridge of 
Linlithgow even their innocent babes? Have 
we forgotten the cruel atrocities of the Irish 
Rebellion, or the fierce retaliation of the indig- 
nant Orangemen ] Seeing then that a certain 
extremity of suffering, and the endurance of 
a certain amount of cruelty by intestine oppo- 
nents, will, in all ages, and in all nations, even 
the most moderate and humane, induce the 
dreadful necessity of retaliation, we look with 
pity, though with poignant grief, on the stern 
reprisals to which Don Carlos has been driven, 
and earnestly pray that similar civil discord 
may long be averted from the British isles ; 
and that we may not be doomed by a righteous 
Providence, as we perhaps deserve, to undergo 
the unutterable wretchedness, which our un- 
called for find unjust support of those who 
began the execrable system of murder, has so 
long produced in the Spanish peninsula. 

In attempting to make amends for our hith- 
erto apparent neglect of this interesting sub- 
ject, we rejoice to think that the materials by 
which we can now vindicate the righteous 
cause, and explain to our deluded countrymen 
the gross injustice of which they have been 
rendered the unconscious instruments, have, 
within these last few months, been signally en- 
larged. First, Captain Henningsen's animated 
and graphic narrative enlisted our sympa- 
thies in favour of the gallant mountaineers, 
beside whom he drew the sword of freedom. 
Next, Mr. Honan's able and well-informed 
work unfolded still more fully the nature of 
the contest, and the resources from which the 
Basque peasantry have maintained so long 
and surprising a struggle in defence of their 
privileges against all the forces which have 
been arrayed against them. Then Lord Caernar- 
von's admirable disquisition on the war, an- 
nexed to his highly interesting tour in the Por- 
tuguese provinces, gave to the statements of 
his excellent predecessors the weight of his 
authority, the aid of his learning, and the sup- 
port of his eloquence. Though last, not least, 
Mr. Walton has taken the field with two octavo 
vo'iimes, whjch throw a flood of light on ihe 
real nature of the contest now raging in the 
Peninsula, — the objects of the parties en- 
gaged, — the claims of the competitors to the 
throne, — the consequence of the triumph of 
the one or the other on the future interests of 
religion and freedom, — the cruel severities to 
which the Carlists were subjected by their 
blood-thirsty enemies before they were reluc- 
tantly driven to retaliation, — and the frightful 



328 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



consequences which have resulted, and must 
continue to result while it endures, from our 
iniquitous co-operation with the cause of op- 
pression. All these momentous topics are 
treated in the volumes before us with a clear- 
ness, temper, moderation, and ability which 
leave nothing to be desired, and render them 
by far the most important work on the affairs 
of the Peninsula which has yet issued from the 
European press. When we see the ability 
and candour, the courage and energy, the learn- 
ing and eloquence, which, unbought by the 
gold of the stock exchange, uninfluenced by 
speculations in Spanish bonds, unsolicited by 
the rewards of a deceived democratic and com- 
mission-granting administration, is thus gene- 
rously and gratuitously coming forward from 
so many quarters at once in defence of the 
cause of religious truth and independence, we 
recognise the revival of the spirit of old Eng- 
land; we indulge a hope that the press, like 
the Thames water, may yet work off its own 
impurities; and we are ready to take our 
humble part in so good a cause, and bear with 
equanimity the torrent of abuse with which the 
servile writers of the Treasury, or the hireling 
scribes of the stock exchange, will assail our 
endeavours to give greater publicity than, in a 
selfish and engrossed age, they might otherwise 
obtain to their all-important disclosures. 

From the statements proved, and documents 
brought forward, in Mr. Walton's work, it is 
manifest, — 

1. That the constitution of 1812, so long the 
darling object of democratic contention in the 
Peninsula, and now the avowed basis of its 
government, is an ultra-republican system, 
which never obtained the legal consent of the 
nation, but was merely imposed on their 
countrymen for their own selfish ends by a 
knot of urban democrats at Cadiz, who at that 
unhappy period, when four-fifths of the country 
was occupied by the French armies, had con- 
trived to usurp the powers, not only of sove- 
reignty, but of remodelling the state. 

2. That it is not only utterly unsuitable to 
the Spanish people, and necessarily produc- 
tive of (as it ever has produced) nothing but 
plunder, massacre, and democratic oppression ; 
but is of so absurd and ill-considered a cha- 
racteras even, if established in England, amidst 
a people habituated for centuries to the exer- 
cise of freedom, would tear society to atoms 
in six months. 

3. That, from experience of the devastating 
effects of this ultra-radical constitution, and 
the sordid cupidity of the democratic agents 
whom it instantly brings to the head of affairs, 
the great majority of the Spanish nation, almost 
all who are distinguished by their patriotism, 
principle, or good sense, are decidedly opposed 
to its continuance ; that though often established 
by military violence or democratic intrigue, it 
has ever fallen to the ground by its own weight 
when not upheld, as it now is, by powerful fo- 
reign co-operation ; and that at this moment, 
if this co-operation were really withdrawn, it 
would sink to the dust in three months, with all 
its accessaries of democratic spoliation, royal- 
ist blood, and universal suffering, never more 
?« rise 



4. That the democratic party, since the time 
that nine-tenths of the nation had become the 
decided enemies of their usurpation, fell upon 
the expedient of engrafting the maintenance 
of their cause upon a disputed succession to 
the throne, — prevailed on Ferdinand VII., when 
in a state of dotage, to alter the law of royal 
succession in favour of his infant daughter, — 
got together the farce of a Cortes, to give their 
sanction to the illegal act, — and have since 
contrived to keep her on the throne, as a mere 
puppet, to serve as a cover to their revolution- 
ary designs, despite the clearly proved voice 
of the nation, by filling the army and all civil 
offices with their own creatures, and maintain- 
ing an usurped and hateful usurpation by the 
aid of urban democracy, foreign co-operation, 
and stock-jobbing assistance. 

5. That the title of Don Carlos to the throne 
is clear, not less on the legitimate principle of 
legal succession, which we were bound, in 
the most solemn manner, by the treaty of 
Utrecht, to guaranty, than on the liberal prin- 
ciple of a violation of the social contract, and 
a trampling under foot all the rights and pri- 
vileges of the people, dissolving the title of a 
sovereign, how well-founded soever in itself, 
to the supreme direction of affairs. 

6. That the frightful system of murdering 
the prisoners was first introduced by the Revo- 
lutionists; that it was carried on with ruthless 
severity and heartless rigour by them for years 
before it was imitated by the Royalists ; that they 
have repeatedly made endeavours, both pub- 
licly and privately, to put a stop to its con- 
tinuance, but always been foiled by the refusal 
of their savage antagonists. 

7. That the English auxiliaries, both under 
General Evans and Lord John Hay, lent their 
powerful aid to the Revolutionary party, not 
only without the English government having 
made any effectual stipulation in favour of the 
abandoning that atrocious system of warfare, 
but at a time when, without such aid, the war 
was on the point of being brought to a glorious 
termination by the freeborn mountaineers of 
Biscay and Navarre, and have thus become 
implicated, through the fault or neglect of 
their government, in all the woful conse- 
quences of a continuance of the struggle. 

8. That the stand made by the Basque pro- 
vinces is for their rights and their liberties, 
their privileges and their immunities, enjoyed 
by their ancestors for five hundred years, 
asserted by them in every age with a con- 
stancy and spirit exceeding: even the far-famed 
resolution of the Swiss Cantons, but which 
were all reft from them at one fell swoop by the 
ruthless tyranny of a democratic despotism. 

It is impossible, in the limits of an article in 
a periodical, to quote all the documents, or de- 
tail all the facts, which Mr. Walton has accu- 
mulated, with irresistible force, to prove every 
one of these propositions. If any one doubts 
them, we earnestly recommend him to study 
his work ; and if he is not convinced, we say, 
without hesitation, neither would he be per- 
suaded though one rose from the dead. But even 
in this cursory notice a few leading facts may 
be brought forward, which cannot fail to throw 
a clear light on this important subject, and 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



may tend to aid the efforts of those brave and j 
enlightened men who are now striving to pre- ' 
vent British blood from being any longer shed 
in the most unjust of causes, and hinder the 
British standards from being any longer un- 
furled, in the name of freedom and liberty, to 
uphold the cause of infidelity, rapine, and op- 
pression. 

Of the manner in which the Constitution of 
1812 was fabricated by a clique of urban agita- 
tors in Cadiz, when blockaded by the French 
forces in 1810, and thrust, amidst the agonies 
of the war with Napoleon, on an unconscious 
or unwilling nation, the following account is 
given by our author: — 

"In the decrees and other preparations made 
by the central junta, in anticipation of the 
meeting of Cortes, the old mode of convening 
the national assembly had been abandoned, the 
illuminati congregated at Seville being of 
opinion 'that the ancient usages were more a 
matter of historical research than of practical 
importance.' It was therefore agreed, that in 
their stead a new electoral law should be 
framed, more congenial to the general princi- 
ple of representation ; the result of which was, 
that those cities which had deputies in the 
Cortes last assembled were to have a voice, as 
well as the superior juntas, and that one deputy 
should besides be elected for every fifty thou- 
sand souls. It was also settled that the South 
American provinces, at the time actually in a 
state of insurrection, should, for the present, 
have substitutes chosen for them, until they 
sent over delegates duly elected. It is a cu- 
rious fact, that on the 18th of the previous 
April, Joseph Bonaparte had convened the 
Cortes, and it was at the time thought that this 
example served to stimulate the central junto 
to perform their long forgotten promise. 

"The new fashioned Cortes opened on the 
24th of September, consisting only of popular 
deputies, or one estate, the other two being 
excluded. When the inaugural ceremonies were 
over, the members assembled declared them- 
selves legally constituted in 'general and extra- 
ordinary Cortes,' in whom the national sove- 
reignty resided ; or, in other words, they at once 
declared themselves a constituent assembly. 

" In one respect, the assembly of the Spanish 
Cortes of 1810, resembled that of the French 
States-general in 1791, the members being 
mostly new men whose names had scarcely 
been heard of before. In another sense, the 
disparity between the two assemblies was 
great. The States-general opened their sit- 
tings under legal forms, with the three orders, 
and, after stormy debates, one estate ejected or ab- 
sorbed the other two, when the triumphant party, 
declaring themselves a constituent assembly, 
proceeded to enact laws and frame a constitu- 
tion ; in the end, rendering themselves superior 
to the authority which had convened them, and 
no longer responsible to those whom they were 
intended to represent. The Cadiz Cortes 
adopted a readier and less complicated plan. 
In utter defiance of legal forms and ancient 
usages, the Spanish Commons before hand excluded 
the tiro privileged estates ; and assembling entirely 
on their own account, at once voted themselves to 
be a constituent assembly, possessing all the es 
42 



sential attributes of sovereignty, and deliber- 
ately proceeded to imitate the example of their 
Parisian prototypes. 

"The examples given in our early pages 
show the little analogy between the ancient 
and new Cortes. The latter did not meet to 
supply the want of a regal power, to provide 
means of defence, obtain the redress of griev- 
ances, or reconcile opposite and jarring inte- 
rests. Their object was not to heal the wounds 
in the state, to introduce order and concert, or 
remove those obstacles which had hitherto im- 
peded the progress of the national cause. As 
the genuine offspring of the central junta, they 
rather thought of seizing upon power, enjoying its 
sweets, and carrying into effect those theories 
with a fondness for which an admiration of the 
French Revolution had infected many leading 
members, some of whom were anxious to shine 
after the manner of Mirabeau, — whilst others 
thought they could emulate the example of 
Abbe Sieyes, or took Brissot as their model. 
In a word, wholly unpractised in the science 
of legislation, and unmindful that the enemy 
was at their gates, they set to work with a full 
determination to tread in the footsteps of the 
French Constituent Assembly, and began by a 
vote similar to that passed by our House of 
Commons in 1G48, whereby they declared that 
the sovereign power exclusively resided in them, — and, 
consequently, that whatever they enacted was 
law, without the consent of either king, peers, 
or clergy." 

The ruinous step by which, to the exclusion 
of the real representatives of the nation, a 
band of urban Revolutionists contrived to 
thrust themselves into the supreme direction 
of the Constituent Assembly in the Isle of Le- 
on, is thus explained. 

"On the 10th September, 1810, a fortnight 
before the opening of the Cortes, the regents 
issued an edict, accompanied by a decree, in 
which the impossibility of obtaining proper re- 
presentatives from the ultra-marine provinces 
and those occupied by the enemy, is lamented, 
and a plan devised to remedy the defect, by 
means of substitutes chosen upon the spot. It 
was accordingly ordained that twenty-three 
persons should be picked out to represent the places 
held by the French, and thirty for the Indies; 
which number of substitutes, incorporated 
with the real delegates, already arrived or about 
to arrive, it was thought would compose a re- 
spectable congress, sufficient, under existing 
circumstances, to open the house and carry on 
business, even although others should unfortu- 
nately not arrive."* 

From the official records of the Cortes, it ap- 
pears that its numbers stood thus: 
Members returned by provinces of Spain 

unoccupied by the French, . 127 

Substitutes provided at Cadiz, for i,\e 

others, 45 

" It would be almost insulting to the judg- 
ment of the reader to offer any remarks upon 
either the illegality or the incongruity of a le- 
gislature composed of such elements as the 
preceding sketch presents. Independently cf 



* " For the electors and the elected the only qualifica- 
tions required were to be a householder and twenty-five 
years of age." 

2 e 2 



330 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



a total abandonment of ancient usages, and an 
utter disregard of the elective franchise prac- 
tised in former times; besides the exclusion 
of two estates, and the enlargement of the third 
on a basis not only impracticable but also ri- 
diculous ; substitutes are put in to represent an 
infinitely larger proportion of territory in both 
hemispheres than that which, with the free 
agency of the inhabitants, is enabled to return 
representatives, elected according to the scale 
proposed by the conveners of the Cortes them- 
selves, founded on rules of their own framing. 
The representative principle was thus entirely lost ; 
and how a party of politicians and philoso- 
phers, circumscribed to a small spot of ground, 
and protected only by the naval force of an 
ally, could, during eighteen months, sit quietly 
down and frame a constitution for the accept- 
ance of nearly thirty millions of people, situ- 
ated in three quarters of the globe, and opposed 
in interests as well as in habits, on a plan so 
defective in all its parts, is the most extraordi- 
nary of the many singularities which marked 
the Spanish contest. 

" In the new representative plan, neither po- 
pulation nor wealth was taken as a basis. 
Valencia, with 1,040,740 souls, was allowed 
nineteen deputies; whilst Granada, including 
Malaga, and containing 1,100,640, had only 
two. The ancient kingdom of Navarre, with 
271,285 souls; Biscay, with 130,000; Guipus- 
coa, with 126,789; and Alava, with 85,139, are 
rated at one each ; whereas the mountains of 
Ronda had two. Spain, with fourteen millions 
of souls, is set down at one hundred and fifty- 
four deputies ; when the South American and 
Asiatic provinces, by the central junta declared 
integral and equal parts of the monarchy, and 
containing a population of more than seven- 
teen millions, were represented by fifty-four. 
Never was any thing more monstrous than the 
organization of the Cadiz legislature— more 
opposed to the practice in ancient times, or 
more at variance with the objects for which 
the Cortes were to meet. It was not even in 
accordance with the wild theories of the day. 
The absence rf opposition was the only sanc- 
tion given to their labours; a circumstance 
which may be easily accounted for in the ex- 
isting state of the Peninsula." 

These Revolutionists were not long in invok- 
ing the aid of the same principles which, ema- 
nating from the Jacobins of Paris, had con- 
signed France to slavery and Europe to blood. 
"Eight or nine journals were immediately 
established in Cadiz, of which one was called 
' The Robespierre? " 

"The principles proclaimed by the constitu- 
tion, if possible, are more monstrous than the 
manner in which it was constructed. It be- 
gins by declaring that the legislature is com- 
posed of the general and extraordinary Cortes 
of the Spanish nations, represented by deputies 
from Spain, America, and Asia; that the na- 
tional sovereignty resides in the Cortes, and 
that the power of making laws belongs to them, 
jointly with the king; that the population is to be 
taken as a basis for the new electoral law, without 
any defined qualification for eligibility ; that the 
Cortes were to meet every year, and, on closing, 
leave a permanent deputation sitting, to watch 



over the observance of the constitution, report 
infractions, and convene the legislature in ex- 
traordinary cases, and that the king should be 
at the head of the executive, and sanction the 
laws. A new plan was also formed for the 
government of the provinces, the election of 
municipalities, the assessment of taxes, and a 
variety of other purposes. In a word, the Ca- 
diz code deprived the king of the power of dissolving 
or proroguing the Cortes, and in other respects 
destroyed the royal prerogative, as well as feudal 
tenures and the rights of property. It con- 
founded the various classes, reduced the power 
of the clergy, extinguished the civil rights of a 
whole community, cancelled all previous com- 
pacts made between the sovereign and the peo- 
ple, broke the bond of union, tore asunder the 
charters, confiscated the privileges and fran- 
chises so highly valued by the inhabitants, and, 
in a word, obliterated every line and feature of the 
ancient institutions, by transforming Spain into 
the reverse of what she had been. It was a 
sweeping proscription of every privileged and 
corporate body in the country, annihilating the 
whole, and leaving neither wreck nor vestige 
behind." 

Of this constitution, which is now the con- 
stitution of Spain, which the arms, ay, the 
royal arms of England are employed to uphold, 
it is sufficient to say that it establishes — 
1, Universal Suffrage; 2, One Legislative 
Chamber ; 3, Annual Parliaments ; 4, It an- 
nihilates all the power of the nobles and cler- 
gy; 5, Sweeps away all corporate rights and 
feudal privileges ; 6, Exterminates the whole 
royal prerogative. How long would the British 
empire withstand the shock of such a constitu- 
tion 1 Not one week. 

Even before it was brought into operation, 
or the French armies had been driven by Bri- 
tish valour from the soil of Spain, the ruinous 
effect of this monstrous constitution was so 
clearly perceived, that the democratic despots 
were fearful of its overthrow. 

" Such a transition as that which this code 
was calculated to effect, was too sudden and 
too violent not to meet with decided opposition. 
Its levelling principles and subversive doc- 
trines were accordingly denounced from the 
pulpit and by the press. Every epithet of 
odium and contempt was applied to its of- 
ficious framers ; and so great was the appre- 
hension of disturbances entertained by the go- 
vernment itself, that within a month after its 
promulgation, they prevented arms from being 
intrusted to the Galician peasantry. Indivi- 
duals of rank and influence were banished for 
merely expressing their disapprobation of its 
provisions, or their dread of the calamities 
which it was likely to produce." 

The fate of this monstrous democratic abor- 
tion is well known. On Ferdinand's accession 
it fell to the ground from its own weight ; not 
a sword required to be drawn, or a shot fired, to 
dissolve the destructive fabric. His famous 
decree from Valencia, on May 4, 1814, at once 
extinguished the Cadiz constitution. In that 
instrument, Ferdinand justly said: 

" To this Cortes, in 1810, convened in a man- 
ner never practised in Spain, even in the most 
arduous cases, and in the turbulent times of 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



331 



minorities, when the meeting of deputies has 
been more numerous than in usual and ordi- 
nary Cortes, the estates of the nobility and cler- 
gy were not called, notwithstanding the central 
junta ordered this to be done by a decree, art- 
fully concealed from the council of regency, 
who were equally unaware that to them the 
junta had assigned the presidency of the Cortes; 
a prerogative which otherwise never would 
have been left at the will of the Congress. 
Every thing was thus placed at the disposal of 
the Cortes, who on the very day of their instal- 
lation, and as a commencement of their acts, 
stripped me of the sovereignty which the depu- 
ties themselves had just before acknowledged, 
nominally attributing it to the nation, in order 
to appropriate it to themselves, and by this 
usurpation enact such laws as they deemed fit, 
imposing on the people the obligation of forci- 
bly receiving them in the form of a new con- 
stitution, which the deputies established, and 
afterwards sanctioned and published in 1812, 
without powers from either provinces, towns, 
or juntas, and without even the knowledge of 
those said to be represented by the substitutes 
of Spain and the Indies. 

"This first outrage against the royal prero- 
gative was, as it were, a basis for the many 
others which followed; and notwithstanding 
the repugnance of many deputies, laws were 
enacted, adopted, and called fundamental ones, 
amidst the cries, threats, and violence of those 
who frequented the Cortes galleries; whereby 
to that which was only the work of a faction 
the specious colouring of the general will was 
given, and for such made to pass among a few 
seditious persons at Cadiz, and afterwards at 
Madrid. These are notorious facts, and thus 
were those good laws altered which once con- 
stituted the felicity of our nation. The ancient 
form of the monarchy was changed, and by 
copying the revolutionary and democratic 
principles of the French constitution of 1791, 
were sanctioned, not the fundamental laws of 
a moderate monarchy, but rather those of a 
popular government, with a chief magistrate 
at its head — a mere delegated executive, and 
not a king, notwithstanding the introduction of 
the name as a deception to the incautious." 

The joy of the nation at this specific libera- 
tion from their revolutionary tyrants knew no 
bounds. It was like that of the English on 
the Restoration. The journey of the king from 
Valencia to the capital was a continued tri- 
umph. 

"Some members and other flaming patriots 
proposed open resistance, but soon found that. 
they possessed neither physical nor moral 
power. As far as outward appearances went, 
they preserved their consistenc} 7 , or rather 
their delirium, till the close. Some of the most 
vociferous were however seized ; and this put 
an end to the show of opposition. Ferdinand 
VII. entered the capital on the 14th, amidst ge- 
neral acclamations and other demonstrations 
of joy. Persons present attest that never did 
Madrid witness such a scene of general exulta- 
tion. When the king alighted, the people took 
him up in their arms, and triumphantly showed 
him to the immense concourse assembled in 
front of the palace, and in their arms conveyed 



him to his apartment. From Aranjuez to Ma- 
drid, his carriage had been previously drawn 
by the people. In the afternoon of the 16th, 
he walked through several parts of the town, 
the streets thronged with spectators; but not 
a single constitutionalist ventured to show his 
face." 

We have dwelt the longer on the original 
illegal formation, and revolutionary principles 
of the constitution, because it lies in truth at 
the bottom of the whole question. The Cadiz 
democrats, like all other reckless revolu- 
tionists, bestowed on the nation at once, without 
either preparation or reason, the prodigal gift 
of unbounded political influence. The whole 
powers of government were by them vested 
in one Chamber: the Cortes combined the 
powers of the executive and legislature in 
England, being vested at once with the exclu- 
sive right of imposing taxes, passing laws, 
declaring war and peace. These vast powers 
were vested in one single assembly, unfettered by 
any separate House of Peers, or the repre- 
sentation of the clergy in any shape. And 
how was this omnipotent assembly chosen? 
By universal suffrage; by the votes of every 
man in Spain who had a house and was twen- 
ty-five years of age. No qualification was re- 
quired either in the electors or representatives. 
A majority of beggars might rule the state, 
and dispose at will of all the property it con- 
tained! ! ! 

The urban revolutionists of Spain, an ar- 
dent, energetic, insolvent class, instantly per- 
ceived the enormous advantages which this 
extravagant constitution gave them. They 
saw clearly that under this radical constitu- 
tion, they would in fact be the rulers of the 
state; that its whole offices, emoluments, in- 
fluence, and property would ere long be at their 
disposal ; and that by simply sticking to that 
one point, "The constitution of 1812," they 
would soon, and without bloodshed as they 
hoped, and by the mere force of legislative 
enactment, strip all the holders of property, 
not only of their influence, but their posses- 
sions. In the few great towns, accordingly, 
which the Peninsula contains, in Madrid, Ca- 
diz, Seville, Barcelona, Valentia, Bilboa, and 
Malaga, a clique of agitators was immediately 
formed, who, destitute of property, education, 
or character, were yet formidable to the hold- 
ers of property over the kingdom by their in- 
fluence over the population in these great 
centres of profligacy, pauperism, and ambition. 
They were closely held together by the hellish 
bond of anticipated plunder. Freedom, liberty, 
and independence were ever in their mouths ; 
tyranny, plunder, massacre unceasingly in 
their hearts. But though a miserable minority, 
not amounting to a fiftieth part of the whole 
nation, they had great advantages m the poli- 
tical strife in which they were engaged, from 
their position in the great fortified towns of the 
kingdom, from their sway over the depraved 
and deluded populace, from the rapid commu- 
nication which they maintained with each 
other, from the want of union, organization, 
or intelligence among their rural antagonists, 
from the possession of a plausible cri de guerre, 
"The constitution of 1812," which was sup 



332 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



posed to De a sovereign charm by its support- 
ers for every evil ; and from the union, energy, 
and resolution which present insolvency and 
the prospect of future plunder had diffused 
universally through their ranks. 

It is the more material to attend to these 
considerations, because it is the struggle to re- 
establish this radical constitution which is the 
real matter that has ever since been at issue 
between the two parties in the Peninsula. The 
Queen at Madrid was from the first a mere 
puppet; the Estatnto Reals, mere instalment; 
the revolt of La Granja brought to light their 
real projects, and revealed, in its pristine na- 
kedness, the violence and iniquity of the de- 
mocratic faction. By it the constitution of 
1812 has again become the basis of the con- 
stitution: a nocturnal revolt, an irruption into 
the bed-chamber of the queen, a drunken ser- 
geant and ten treasonable grenadiers were suf- 
ficient to knock down the phantom of a con- 
stitutional monarchy, which, as a mask to 
their ulterior designs, the revolutionists had 
set up. And it is to support such a cause, to 
establish such a revolutionary regime, that Gene- 
ral Evans and his unhappy band have been 
exposed to defeat and dishonour, and 500,000/. 
worth of arms and ammunition sent to the de- 
mocratics of the Peninsula, and the royal flag 
of England displayed beside the abettors of 
spoliation, robbery, and murder! 

The evils experienced and anticipated from 
this radical constitution, however, were so 
powerful, that it probably never again would 
have reared its hated head in Spain, were it 
not that in an evil hour Ferdinand VII. resolved 
upon an expedition to South America in 1821, 
to subdue the revolted provinces, and assem- 
bled 20,000 men in the Isle of Leon for that 
purpose. This distant service was to the last 
degree unpopular in the Spanish army; its 
inglorious dangers, its certain hardships, its 
boundless fatigues, its remote situation, its 
probable disastrous termination, were present 
to every mind, and filled both officers and men 
with the most gloomy presentiments, and left 
them in that state of moody despair when the 
most desperate and flagitious projects are most 
likely to be embraced with alacrity. The 
presence of 20,000 men close to Cadiz or with- 
in its walls, influenced by these feelings, was 
too favourable an opportunity ior the revolu- 
tionists in that great centre of democracy to 
let slip for re-establishing their hated do- 
minion. While the troops were waiting for 
the transports to convey them across the At- 
lantic, which, with the usual want of foresight 
in the Spanish character, were very long of 
being prepared, intrigues were actively set on 
foot by the Cadiz clique; and in the subaltern 
officers of the army, which in Spain is almost 
wholly destitute of men of property, and filled 
with mere adventurers, they found the most 
ready reception. Soldiers, unless restrained 
by preponderance of property and education 
in their officers, are never averse to playing 
the part of praetorians ; they are seldom disin- 
clined to setting an empire up to sale. The 
glittering prospect, on the one hand, of escaping 
a perilous, hateful, and inglorious foreign ser- 
vice, and on the other, disposing of the whole 



emoluments and advantages of government 
for themselves or their connections, was more 
than the military adventurers of the Isle of 
Leon could withstand ; they revolted ; raised 
the cry of "The constitution of 1812," amidst 
the transports of the democratic party over all 
Spain ; and the king, destitute of any military 
force to withstand so formidable an insurrec- 
tion, was, after a trifling attempt at resistance, 
forced into submission. The promised boon 
was not withheld from the traitor soldiers, who 
had, by violating their oaths, brought about 
the revolution; they were retained at home; 
the expedition against South America was laid 
aside, and the crown of the Indies for ever lost 
to the throne of Castile. But what was that 
to the Spanish democrats 1 What did it sig- 
nify that the empire was dismembered, and the 
transatlantic colonies consigned to an anarchy, 
despotism, and suffering, unparalleled in mo- 
dern times 1 They had got to the head of af- 
fairs ; the pillar of the constitution was raised 
in every considerable town of Spain ; the Ca- 
diz clique had become prime ministers ; and 
every province of the Peninsula was placed 
under the rule of a set of low rapacious revo- 
lutionary employes, who made use of all their 
authority to promote the election of such ex- 
treme deputies for the Cortes as might insure 
the total revolutionizing of the state. 

Even while the Liberals lay at Cadiz, they 
had begun their system of rapacious ini- 
quity: — 

" M. Alcala Galiano," sa} r s Walton, " assisted 
in a civil capacity, and when the mutineers 
were shut up in La Isla, wrote the principal 
proclamations and addresses which served to 
extend the insurrection. On reaching Madrid, 
this civilian became one of the leading speak- 
ers at the debating society of the Font ana de 
Oro, and was afterwards named Intendant of 
Cordova. In 1822 he was elected to the Cor- 
tes, from which period he is classed among 
the leaders of the exdltados. His speeches 
were marked with impetuosity and extreme 
liberalism ; but his ideas were not always re- 
gular, or his conduct consistent. He was among 
the emigrants in this country, and a warm ad- 
mirer of radicalism, — a blessing of which the 
last importation into Spain has been pretty ex- 
tensive. The latter part of his political career 
was the most successful, his labours having 
been crowned with the appointment of Minis- 
ter of Marine. Whilst the army remained at 
La Isla, the naval arsenals were complclcly gutted. 
The copper, brass cannon, rigging, and other valu- 
ables, were sold to the Gibraltar Jews, who ascended 
the river of Santi Petri and fetched their pur- 
chases away." 

The worshippers of the constitution of 1812 
were not slow in beginning with the first and 
greatest of all revolutionary projects, the con- 
fiscation of the property of the church. 

" Various reports," says Mr. Walton, "on the 
poverty of the treasury, the annual deficit, the 
arrears of pay, and a variety of other finan- 
cial matters, had been submitted to the cham- 
ber, and produced no small degree of embar- 
rassment. The expedient of a foreign loan was 
adopted ; and it being no longer necessary to 
temporize with the clergy, a plan was formed 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



333 



for the appropriation of church property, which it 
was supposed would yield an abundant har- 
vest. By a decree passed October 1st, the 
monasteries were suppressed, excepting a cer- 
tain number, and also several of the military 
orders, the revenues of which, it was agreed, 
should be set apart for the payment of the na- 
tional debt, after pensions had been secured to 
Riega, Quiroga, and the other leaders of the 
La Isla mutiny. The inmates of the sup- 
pressed convents were to receive stipends 
from the government; but it was clear that 
the exigencies of the state, if no other reasons 
existed, would prevent the performance of this 
promise. Hitherto the king had remained 
passive, and sanctioned, certainly against his 
will, yet without any remonstrance, the various 
acts tending to destroy the little authority left 
to him ; but when called upon for his assent to 
the suppression of the regular orders, he hesi- 
tated. At the end of a month his signature 
was reluctantly affixed, and the next day he 
departed for the Escurial." 

Nor were tyrannic measures to enforce the 
authority of these popular despots wanting. 

" Among the new measures was a decree 
awarding the penalty of banishment for eight 
years against any one endeavouring to dis- 
suade the people from the observance of the 
constitution, and imprisonment for that period 
if an ecclesiastic." 

This violent spoliation, however, excited at 
the time a general feeling of indignation. 

"This precipitate if not unjust measure on 
the part of the Cortes, could not fail to rouse 
public indignation and prepare the way for their 
own downfal. Besides the nature of the act, 
which general opinion regarded as a profana- 
tion, numbers of persons venerable in the eyes 
of the people were sent forth from their seclu- 
sion to beg their bread. The project, there- 
fore, came before the public stamped with a 
double title to reprobation. It was pronounced 
a violent spoliation, as well as a revolting act 
of irreligion ; and it appears strange that the 
patriotic senators of 1820, after clashing with 
the nobles and depriving so many public func- 
tionaries of their places, should have thus 
braved the anger of so powerful a body as the 
clergy 



had been interwoven with the frame of society 
in Spain — they were considered as a principal 
appendage of the religion of the state, had 
been formed by the collective funds of private 
individuals, were associated with proud recol- 
lections of the past, and still held in veneration 
by all excepting the liberal party. When, 
therefore, the people saw these establishments 
suppressed, the aged, who had spent their little 
all to procure an asylum for life, cast upon the 
world, and their substance bestowed upon per- 
sons who had set the worst possible example 
by heading a military rebellion — their resent- 
ment passed all bounds."* 

The first commencement of the civil war of 
1822 and of that atrocious system of massacre, 
which has ever since disgraced the Peninsula, 
is then given by our author; and as murder 
was their grand weapon, so they were so dead 
to all sense of justice or shame, that they ac- 
tually HAD ITS EMBLEM ENGRAVED ON THEIR 

seals. It was in the massacre of a man who 
had merely counselled "a free and national 
government." 

"A paper of a mixed character made its 
appearance in the capital, tending to excite a 
counter-revolutionary movement. It preached 
— ' No despotism and no anarchy — no camarilla 
and no factious Cortes; bid a free and national 
government founded on the ancient institutions? 
The author being discovered, was thrown into 
prison, and his name ascertained to be Vinu- 
esa, formerly the curate of Tamajon, a small 
town in the province of Gaudalajara, seven 
leagues from the capital, and lately one of the 
king's honorary chaplains. At a moment of 
public excitement an incident of this kind was 
likely to produce much noise in a place where 
idlers and politicians abound. A surmise got 
abroad that the prisoner, in consequence of his 
high connections, would be protected, and an 
evasion of justice was apprehended. This 
sufficed to rouse the ardent spirits frequenting 
the Puerta del Sol, and in the true sense of the 
sovereignty of the people, they rushed in a 
crowd to the prison, forced open the door, en- 
tered the curate's cell, and with a blacksmith's 
hammer beat out his brain s.f 

"This murder was a signal for general agi- 
tation. The nobles, royalist officers, and ex- 



Having obtained possession of the political functionaries, held up to contempt and derision 
stage, they formed a confederacy to keep it ex- 1 the conduct of those who were unable to pre 
clusively to themselves ; and if any thing was 
wanting to complete their usurpation, it was 
to vote their own perpetuity, as the long par- 
liament did in 1642, and by means of intimi- 
dation obtain the king's consent. They had 
an army at their disposal, and, as was done in 
the time of Charles I., some of the king's advi- 
sers were denounced as enemies of the state. 
The indignity offered to him previously to his 
abrupt departure for the Escurial, called into 
action all the elements of collision. The re- 
duction of the monastic orders might be 
deemed advisable — nay, necessary, — so it had 
been thought before ; but the constitutionalists 
having resolved upon that important measure, 
contrived to render it doubly dangerous by the 
manner and degree in which it was to be exe- 
cuted, and the time chosen for carrying it into 
effect. Religious establishments of this kind 



vent the commission of such an atrocity. The 
ejected monks called the peasants to arms, by 
invoking the altar and the throne, or appealing 
to their own wrongs. 

* "Quiroga, for example, had capitalized his pension, 
and thus obtained possession of the Granja de Cernadas, 
a valuable estate near Hetanzos, in Galicia, belonging to 
the monastery of San Martin, at Santiago, of the Bene- 
dictine order, upon which he cut a large quantity of tim- 
ber. Others had obtained estates, the property of the 
suppressed orders, in a similar manner." 

t "This deed was celebrated in songs, sung about the 
streets and in the guard-houses. In its commemoration, 
seals were worn with a crest representing a brawny and 
naked arm holding a hammer in the hand. This seal be- 
came fashionable among the martillo ?r hammer faction, 
and letters at that time, received in England, frequently 
had that impression upon them. The mob were also in 
the habit of expressing their displeasure at the conduct 
of an individual by beating hammers on the pavement 
under his windows ; a pretty significant indication of the 
fate which awaited him if he sinned against the sove- 
reign people." 



334 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



" The large cities were, in a contrary sense, 
agitated by clubs and debating societies. At 
first these clubs had been the organs of go- 
vernment; now they wished to dictate the 
means by which the commonwealth was to be 
saved. They publicly reproached the minis- 
ters for their apathy, almost accused them of 
being leagued with the king, whom they de- 
nounced as the chief plotter, and his palace as 
a ready receptacle for the Seniles." 

And now we come to a most important sub- 
ject — one to which we earnestly request the 
serious attention of our countrymen. It is the 
commencement of that war of extermination, 
which, as Mr. Walton justly observes, has ever 
since raged in the Peninsula. Let us see with 
whom the responsibility of its introduction 
rests : — 

" Catalonia was the cause of great disquie- 
tude to the constitutionalists; and in order to 
put down the Army of the Faith, and dislodge 
the regency from the Seo de Urgel, Mina was 
appointed early in September to command that 
principality, and entered on his duties at Le- 
rida. As he himself states, he found ' the 
factious, to the number of thirty-three thousand, 
masters of almost all the country, in posses- 
sion of various strong places and fortresses, 
protected by a great part of the towns, and, 
what was of still greater importance, they had 
a centre of union and government, viz., the 
titular Regency of Spain, established in Urgel;' 
adding, 'these were the elements which pre- 
sented themselves in Catalonia.' After notic- 
ing his preparations, he proceeds thus: — 'I 
commenced operations on the 13th; and a 
month and a half sufficed me to organize a 
small army, to raise the siege of Cervera, and 
take possession of Castell-fullit. J ordered the 
total destruction of this last mentioned town, as a 
punishment for the obstinacy of its rebellious 
inhabitants and defenders; and by way of re- 
torting the contempt with which they replied 
to the repeated messages I sent them, as well 
as for a warning to the rest, upon its ruins I 
ordered the following inscription to be placed: 
'Here stood Castell-fullit. Towns, take warning: 
shelter not the enemies of your country.' 

"Thus spoke and acted the hero of Cata- 
lonia at the close of 1822 ! After enumerating 
a variety of other exploits, the captain-general 
comes to his attack upon the fortress of Urgel, 
where he experienced difficulties, and exulting- 
ly adds, 'that in the end constancy and hero- 
ism were victorious, and six hundred profligates 
and robbers, taken out of the prisons, who form- 
ed the greater part of the faction of the ring- 
leader Romagosa, the defender of the fortress 
of Urgel, expiated their crimes on the morning of 
the evacuation by their death upon the field.' The 
men thus barbarously butchered were royalists, 
the countrymen of this savage pacificator: 
their only crime was that of having embraced 
a cause opposed to his own. 

" As a proof of the spirit with which the 
constitutionalists were then actuated, subjoined 
is an extract from a proclamation, issued by 
Mina a few days before the Duke d'Angou- 
leme entered Madrid: — 'Art. 1. All persons 
who may have been members of a junta, so- 
ciety, or corporation opposed to the present 



system of government, as well as those who 
may have enlisted men or conspired against 
the constitution, shall be irrevocably shot the in- 
stant they are taken. Art. 2. Any town in which 
the inhabitants are called out against the con- 
stitutional troops shall be burned to ashes, and 
till one stone is not left upon another.' — At the 
same time that the governor of Catalonia pub- 
lished this proclamation, General Villacampa 
at Seville issued a similar edict, in which he 
declared that ' every one who by word or deed 
co-operates in the rebellion shall be held to be 
a traitor unci punished as such ; further, that any 
one knowing the situation of the factions and 
concealing it shall be held to be a traitor, and 
as such treated.' This edict closes with the 
following: 'The members of the municipali- 
ties of towns situated at the distance of six 
leagues from a constitutional column, who may 
fail hourly to send in a report of the move- 
ments of the factious in their vicinity, shall 
pay out of their own property a fine of ten 
thousand rials; and if any injury arise out of 
the omission, he shall be judged in a military 
manner. ' " 

It was, therefore, not without reason, that, 
on the 20th November, 1822, Count Nessel- 
rode declared, in a public state paper, expres- 
sive of the feelings and resolutions of the Allied 
Powers regarding Spain — 

"Anarchy appeared in the train of revolu- 
tion — disorder in that of anarchy. Long years 
of tranquil possession ceased to be a sufficient 
title to property ; the most sacred rights were 
disputed; ruinous loans and contributions un- 
ceasingly renewed, destructive of public wealth 
and ruinous to private fortunes. Religion was 
despoiled of her patrimony, and the throne of 
popular respect. The royal dignity was out- 
raged, the supreme authority having passed 
over to assemblies influenced by the blind pas- 
sions of the multitude. To complete these 
calamities, on the 7th July, blood was seen to 
flow in the palace, whilst civil war raged 
throughout the Peninsula." 

The armed intervention to which these events 
in the Peninsula gave rise on the part of France 
in 1823, is well known, and when put to the 
proof, it speedily appeared on how hollow a 
foundation the whole fabric of revolutionary 
power in the Peninsula, with its whole adjuncts 
of church spoliation, democratic plunder, and 
royalist massacre, really rested. The French 
troops marched without opposition from the 
Bidassoa to Cadiz; hardly a shot was fired in 
defence of the constitution of 1812; even the 
armed intervention of a stranger,and the hate- 
ful presence of French soldiers, ever so obnox- 
ious in Spain, could not rouse any resistance 
to the invaders. The recollection of the le- 
gions of Napoleon, and the terrible hardships 
of the Peninsular war, were forgotten in the 
more recent horrors of democratic ascenden- 
cy. But an event happened atCorunna which 
made a profound impression, and powerfully 
contributed to stamp on the future progress of 
the contest that savage character, by which it 
is still unhappily distingiv^aed. 

" At Corunna the most barbarous occurrence 
of the many which sullied the annals of the 
constitutional contest took place. The French 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



guns commanded the bay, in consequence of 
which a number of royalists confined in a pon- 
toon rose upon their guards, cut the cables, 
and drifted out with the tide. Fearful that the 
other prisoners in the Castle of San Anton 
might equally escape, the military governor 
on the 22d ordered fifty-two of them to be 
brought to the town, and in the afternoon they 
were lodged in the prison; but the civil au- 
thorities objecting to this step, in consequence 
of the crowded state of the prisons, as well as 
of the convents, the unhappy men were put 
into a small vessel and conveyed down the bay. 
After doubling the point on which the castle 
stands, and in front of the light-house, called 
the Tower of Hercules, they were brought up in 
pairs from under the hatches, and bound together 
back to back and throivn into the sea. One of the 
victims, seeing the fate which awaited him, 
jumped into the water before his hands were 
tied, and endeavoured to escape by swimming ; 
but, being pursued by some of his execution- 
ers in a boat, they beat out his brains with their 
oars. The tide cast the bodies of these unfor- 
tunate creatures ashore, where they were the 
next morning found by the French soldiers on 
guard. General Bourke sent in a flag of truce, 
complaining of this atrocious act; but the 
monster in command, who had given orders 
for its perpetration, had, in the mean time, to- 
gether with several other patriots, made off in 
a British steamer, and eventually found his 
way to England, where he shared that hospitali- 
ty which was experienced by the other refu- 
gees. On the 12th August, Corunna capitu- 
lated." 

Nor were these atrocities confined to the 
north of the Peninsula. At Granada and Mala- 
ga, the same scenes were enacted with even 
deeper circumstances of horror. 

"So insolent had the nationals become at 
Granada, that royalists and persons of mode- 
rate politics could no longer live in the place. 
Of these a party of about fifteen resolved to 
withdraw into the country ; but no sooner had 
they left the suburbs than they were denounced 
as having gone out to form a guerilla. The 
nationals instantly pursued them, and at the 
distance of two leagues succeeded in captur- 
ing seven, the rest escaping. Among the party 
seized was Father Osuna, an old and venera- 
ble professor in the convent of San Antonio 
Abad ; the rest, customhouse guards and officers 
on half-pay. All, including the friar, were 
bound to the tails of horses, — in this manner 
led into the city and paraded through the 
streets ; after which, to add to the indignity, 
they were cast into the dungeons of what is 
called the lower or common prison, and herd- 
ed with felons. Learning some days after- 
wards where the few who escaped had retired 
to, the eager nationals again sallied forth, and 
succeeded in surprising five at the little town 
of Colomera, situated in the mountains, four 
leagues from Granada. Their hands being 
bound behind them, they were brutally assassi- 
nated on a small ridge of hills overlooking the 
bridge Cubillas. So ferociously did the nation- 
als wreak their vengeance upon these victims 
of their licentious fury, that their mangled 
bodies could not be recognised by their friends, 



who the next day went out to bury them. 
Among the victims were two officers of the 
guards, the handsomest youths in the province. 

" The seven confined in prison demanded an 
inquiry into the causes of their arrest and de- 
tention ; but nothing appearing against them 
beyond their being reputed royalists, which did 
not exactly warrant the penalty of death, the 
nationals felt afraid that their victims would 
escape. In the afternoon of the 4th February 
they therefore got up a commotion in the usual 
way, and heated with wine, groups passed 
along the streets, demanding the heads of 
Father Osuna and his companions. Reaching 
the front of the prison, they set up yells, to be 
heard by the inmates, reiterating their demand, 
and endeavouring to force a passage through 
the gate, where a sergeant and a few soldiers 
were generally posted ; but when the uproar 
commenced, General Villacampa, the governor, 
doubled the guard, and stationed a lieutenant 
there. The mob being disappointed, went away. 

" In the evening the lieutenant was changed, 
and an officer in the confidence of the nation- 
als was placed at the prison-gate. The com- 
motion was now renewed, and the leaders of 
the mob assembling at a noted coffee-house in 
the Plaza Nueva, their usual resort, the death 
of the prisoners was at once decreed. Sure of 
their game, the brave nationals hurried off" to 
the prison, where they were received with a 
volley of musketry, pointed so high that the 
balls struck midway up the wall of the cathe- 
dral, fronting the prison-gate, where the marks 
are still seen. This saved appearances, and 
the commanding officer thought his responsi- 
bility sufficiently covered. The blood-thirsty 
mob now rushed into the prison, the leaders 
with their faces blackened and their persons 
disguised. Five inmates in separate cells were 
soon laid prostrate upon the ground covered with 
stabs. One of them, posted in a corner, man- 
fully defended himself with a pillow, which 
dropped from his hands after they had literally 
been cut to pieces. 

" Father Osuna was now led forth, — as the 
old man supposed, that his life might be saved : 
but no sooaer had he gone fifteen paces be- 
yond the prison-gate and turned the corner of 
a narrow street, than he received a sabre-cut 
on the top of his bald head. He lifted up his 
hand to the streaming wound, and at the same 
moment a blow knocked him against the wall, 
upon which the bloody imprint of his hand 
was left as he endeavoured to save himself 
from falling. Dropping to the ground, he was 
beaten with sticks and cut with knives. Sup- 
posing him dead, the mob dispersed ; when 
the jailer, hearing his moans, conveyed him 
back to prison, where his wounds were dress- 
ed. The next day, the heroic nationals, hearing 
that Father Osuna still survived, flew to the 
prison ; when one of them, after insulting and 
upbraiding him for his royalist principles, put 
a pistol to his right ear, and blew his brains upon 
the opposite wall, where the bloody traces were 
seen till within the two last years, and till the 
interior of the prison was repaired. The se- 
venth victim, who had been conveyed to the 
upper prison, was murdered under similar cir- 
cumstances. These scenes ended in a drunkea 



336 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



frolic; and if they occurred in 1823, can 
any one be astonished that they should now be 
repeated ?" 

Our heart sickens at these atrocities; but 
the exhibition of them at this crisis is an in- 
dispensable duty on the part of every lover of 
truth and justice. It is now the game of the 
English liberals to withdraw all sympathy 
from Don Carlos and his heroic followers, by 
constantly representing him as a blood-thirsty 
tyrant, a monster unfit to live, with whom the 
infamous system of giving no quarter origin- 
ated. The documents and historical facts now 
quoted may show how totally unfounded is this 
assertion. Here we have the liberals of 
Spain, — the humane, philanthropic revolution- 
ists of the Peninsula, committing these atroci- 
ties when at the helm of affairs, not only before 
the royalists, but ten years before the death of 
Ferdinand, and when Don Carlos was still liv- 
ing secluded in private life. These massacres 
were commenced by the liberals when in pos- 
session of the government, the fortresses, the 
treasury, the army. When such frightful deeds 
of blood stained their first successes over their 
helpless royalist antagonists, it is not surpris- 
ing that a profound feeling of indignation was 
roused through the whole Peninsula, which has 
rendered it the most difficult of tasks to mode- 
rate the sanguinary character of the conflict in 
subsequent times. Hitherto, be it observed, 
the massacres had been all on our side; not 
one act of retaliation had taken place on the 
parts of their opponents. 

With truth it may be said, that the revolu- 
tionary party are ever the same ; they learn 
nothing, they forget nothing. Mr. Walton thus 
sums up, in a few words, the series of crimes 
and follies which had thus twice precipitated 
the democrats of the Peninsula from the pos- 
session of absolute authority. 

"The follies and illegalities committed by 
the Cortes from the moment of their assem- 
bling at Cadiz may be easily traced in the 
pages of this narrative ; and yet the same follies 
and illegalities were at Madrid and Cadiz re- 
peated in 1820, '21, '22, and '23. The Cortes 
first became the legislators of the land by 
means of a flagrant act of usurpation, which, 
under the pretence of being legally constituted, 
they sustained at all hazards ; the second time 
they rose into power by the aid of a military 
mutiny, and were not prudent enough to steer 
clear of the very shoals upon which they had 
previously been stranded. The first time, they 
had a fair opportunity of judging the evils of 
precipitate and ill-considered legislation: they 
then beheld events pregnant with lessons of 
political wisdom, and still had not the sense 
or the courage to correct old mistakes when 
chance again placed the helm of state within 
their grasp. On both occasions they fell from 
the same causes. Public indignation hurled 
them from their seats in 1814; and in 1823 
tney were overpowered, not by the arms of 
France, but by the displeasure of their own 
countrymen, disgusted and wearied out with 
the turmoils in which they had been kept, as 
well as by the many atrocities which they had 
witnessed. Their army of 96,750 men was 
gradually frittered away ; and while in fortified 



towns they were vainly denouncing vengeance, 
in the interior the lips of thousands greeted 
the Duke d'Angouleme, and welcomed him as 
the liberator of their king and country." 

The situation of Ferdinand VII., when thus 
a second time restored to his throne, was sur- 
rounded with difficulties. Not only had the 
most furious passions been awakened in the 
royalists by the savage and uncalled-for mas- 
sacres of their opponents, but the public inte- 
rests in every department had suffered to a 
degree hardly conceivable in so short a period 
as that of the revolutionary domination. 

"The new ministers," says Walton, "who 
were the best men the country could produce, 
found every thing unhinged and in disorder. 
The misfortunes of which the Cadiz code was 
so lamentable a memorial, daily showed them- 
selves in some new shape. The more the 
state of the country was inquired into, the more 
flagrant the errors, if not the guilt, of the fallen 
party appeared. The reports from the pro- 
vinces were appalling — the treasury empty, 
and foreign credit destroyed. On isolated 
points the shades of opinion might have varied; 
but in the condemnation of the acts of the 
liberals, the public voice was unanimous. 
Then only was ascertained in its full extent 
the galling nature of their yoke." 

An amnesty was immediately published by 
the king. The exceptions were numerous, 
amounting to nearly two thousand persons; 
but " they were chiefly assassins — men whom 
no amnesty could reach." The means of 
being reinstated in favour were amply afforded 
to those who were not actually stained with 
blood; and great numbers were immediately 
reinstated in their employments. The rest, for 
the most part, withdrew to France and Eng- 
land where they lived for many years, main- 
tained by public or private charity, and an ob- 
ject of mistaken interest to the English peo- 
ple, who believed that the selfish projects of 
aggrandisement from which they had been 
dashed were those of freedom and public hap- 
piness. 

The repeated and ludicrous attempts which 
the Spanish Revolutionists at this period made 
to regain their footing in the Peninsula since 

1823 to 1830, and the instant and total failure 
of them all, demonstrated in the clearest man- 
ner the slender hold they had of the public 
mind, and the strong sense of the horrors of 
revolution ary sway which the experience of 
their government had generally produced. 

Doubtless the government of the Royalists 
during the period of their ascendency, from 

1824 to the death of Ferdinand in 1833, was 
not perfect. The ministers of the king must 
have been more than human if, in a country 
in which such a revolutionary party had 
obtained for so ever short a time an ascend- 
ency, they could at once have closed the foun- 
tains of evil. 

" More," says Mr. Walton, " perhaps might 
have been done — many abuses were left un- 
touched; still commerce and agriculture con- 
tinued in a progressive state of improvement. 
The public burdens had also greatly dimin- 
ished. Under the administration of the Cortes, 
the general taxes levied were equal tc 100 mil- 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



337 



lions of rials, afterwards they were reduced to 
40, and the provincial rents from 295 millions 
lowered to 130. The best test is perhaps that 
of the finances; an idea of which may be 
formed from the subjoined approximate state- 
ments, founded upon correct data. 

The foreign debt created by the 

Cortes from September, 1820 

to October, 1823, . . £19,000,000 

Ditto, by the king, from October, 

1823, to September, 1830, . 5,000,000 

Foreign debt cancelled by the 

Cortes, None! 

Ditto by the king, .... 1,000,000 
Interest paid on domestic debt 

by the Cortes, .... None ! 
Since the restoration, . Paid regularly. 

Public expenditure under the 

Cortes, 6,648,133 

Ditto since the restoration, . 4,197,772" 

Thus it appears that the Liberal Govern- 
ment, during their short reign, from October, 
1820, to October, 1823, that is, in t wo years, had 
contracted, in spite of all the produce of the 
confiscated church lands, nineteen millions 
sterling of debt ; and that, in the next seven, 
the king's government had only contracted 
five: that the Cortes paid no interest on the 
national debt, and the king paid it regularly. 
Finally, that the annual expenditure of the 
Cortes was a half greater, besides their enor- 
mous loans, than that of the king. So much 
for the realization of the blessings of cheap 
and good government by the Spanish Revolu- 
tionists ! 

But the time was now approaching when the 
cast down and despairing Democrats of Spain 
were again to be elevated to supreme power, 
and, by the aid of liberal governments in 
France and England, a civil war lighted up in 
the Peninsula, unexampled in modern times 
for constancy and courage on the one side, and 
cruelty and incapacity on the other. 

Ferdinand VII., in his latter years, had mar- 
ried a fourth wife, by whom he had no son, but 
one daughter. By the Spanish law, which, in 
this particular, is an adoption, under certain 
modifications, of the famous Salic law, females 
were excluded from the succession to the 
throne; and this order of succession to the 
Spanish Crown had been guarantied by all the 
powers of Europe, and especially England, by 
the treaty of Utrecht. It had regulated the 
succession to the throne for an hundred and 
thirty years. Ferdinand, however, was de- 
clining both in years and mental vigour. The 
queen was naturally desirous of securing the 
succession to her own offspring, and she was a 
woman of capacity and intrigue well fitted for 
such an enterprise. Upon this state of matters, 
the Liberals immediately fixed all their hopes, 
and artfully succeeded, by implicating the king 
and queen in an alteration of the order of suc- 
cession in favour of their daughter, both to 
divide the Royalist party, distracted between 
the pretensions of the royal competitors, to 
conceal their own selfish projects of aggran- 
disement under a pretended zeal for the main- 
tenance of the new order of descent, and to 
engraft the interest of a disputed succession on 
43 



the native deformity of a merely sordid revolu- 
tionary movement. 

The magnitude and importance of the vast 
change on which the Liberal party had now 
adventured is thus ably stated by Mr. Wal- 
ton : — 

" The law which excluded females when 
there was male issue was precise and pe- 
remptory. It had been enacted with the due 
concurrence of the Cortes, and formed part of 
a general settlement of the peace of Europe, 
at Utrecht, guarantied by England and France. 
This law was besides recorded in the statute- 
book, and for one hundred and twenty years 
had been held as the only rule of succession. 
Its abrogation, therefore, was a matter of the 
most serious consideration, affecting not only 
the prospective claims of the king's brother, 
strengthened as they were by his popularity 
and the royalist interest which he represented, 
but also those of other members of the Bour- 
bon family who came after him in the line of 
succession. The undertaking was indeed ar- 
duous and awful, in consequence of the exten- 
sive changes which it was likely to introduce. 

" It was not a matter of mere family aggran- 
disement upon which the queen had set her 
heart. The proposed measure arose out of no 
wish to revive a principle successfully main- 
tained in former times. It was part of a sys- 
tem of which there was a further action in 
reserve. More and deeper mischief was con- 
templated than that of depriving one branch 
of its hereditary rights. The alteration in the 
established rule was intended as a seal to a revolu- 
tion. This was the light in which Ferdinand 
himself viewed the proposal when first made 
to him ; and although his scruples gradually 
gave way when he found himself beset by the 
creatures and puppets of the queen, there was 
no other period of his life in which his resolu- 
tion on this point could have been shaken. 
Even then the whole scheme would have 
failed, if a clever and fascinating woman had 
not been the principal agent. Her great aim 
was to raise up a barrier between the Infante 
Don Carlos and the throne, and the king's jea- 
lousy of his brother's popularity was the chord 
touched with most effect. The queen also 
knew that this feeling chiefly led to her own 
marriage, and it was agreed that the most pro- 
pitious moment for the development of the 
plan would be the termination of the rejoic- 
ings to which the announcement of her preg- 
nancy had given rise." 

The way in which this extraordinary change 
in the Constitution was introduced is thus de- 
tailed : — 

"In the Gazette of the 6th April, 1830, ti- 
the astonishment of every one, an edict, 
dated March 29th, appeared with the follow- 
ing remarkable heading: — 'Pragmatic Sanc- 
tion, having the force of law, decreed by King 
Charles IV. on the petition of the Cortes for 
1789, and ordered to be published by hi? 
reigning majesty for the perpetual observance 
of law 2, title 15, partida 2, establishing the 
regular succession to the crown of Spain ;' 
alleged to have been in force for seven hun- 
dred years. 
"The publication was also carried into 
2F 



338 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



effect with the usual solemnities. The rain 
fell in torrents ; nevertheless the magistrates 
and heralds proceeded to do their duty by 
reading the decree aloud and posting it up in 
the public places. The streets of Madrid were 
thronged with an anxious and inquiring mul- 
titude, who did not hesitate, in no measured 
terms, to express their surprise and disgust at 
this glaring imposture. Nobody could under- 
stand how the reigning sovereign, of his own 
will and accord, could venture to sanction a 
law alleged to have been passed by his father 
forty-one years before, and which, even if it 
had then been perfected, (and the reverse was 
the case,) could not be held valid for obvious 
reasons." 

It is not our intention to follow Mr. Walton 
through his able argument against the legality 
of the change thus unceremoniously intro- 
duced of the king's own authority, without any 
recourse whatever to a Cortes or any other 
iiational authority. It was not even attempted 
lo get any such authority ; but it was pretend- 
ed that it had been granted when the altera- 
tion on the law of succession had been made 
by Charles IV. in 1789. The absurdity of 
supposing that so important a matter as the 
descent of the crown could be legally altered 
by a pretended act of a king on the petition 
of the Cortes, without its even being known, or 
even heard of, for forty years after its alleged 
enactment, is too obvious to require illustra- 
tion. Add to this, that the pretended altera- 
tion by Charles IV. has never yet been produced, 
or seen by any one ; and that the fact of its 
existence rests on the assertion of a bed-ridden 
doting king in favour of his own daughter. 
And even if such a deed did exist, it would, 
by the fundamental laws of Spain, be utterly 
null in a question with Don Carlos, or the 
princes born before its promulgation, as not 
having been published to the magistrates of 
the provinces in the way required by the Con- 
stitution. The more defective the title of the 
queen to the crown, however, the better for 
the Liberals : they had now a revolutionary dy- 
nasty implicated in their struggle for supreme 
power. 

Upon the publication of this decree, Don 
Carlos, the next male in succession, and di- 
rectly struck at by the ordinance, was solicit- 
ed by the chief nobles of Spain instantly lo 
assume the government. 

" Several grandees," says Mr. Walton, "now 
leagued with the opposite party, together with 
generals and other influential persons, urged 
the Infante Don Carlos to come forward and 
accept the crown, not only as his right, but 
also as the only means of preserving public 
tranquillity. The conscientious prince reject- 
ed their offer, though well aware of the extent 
of his popularity in every part of the king- 
dom ; alleging that so long as the king lived, 
he ivould never do an act derogatory to his character, 
either as a brother or a subject. He was then in- 
vited to take the regency upon himself, which, 
it was argued, could be done without any vio- 
lation of his principles, on the plea of the 
king's illness, and to rescue the country from 
a dreadful crisis ; but again the prince de- 
clined to interfere, observing, that his rights 



and those of his family were clear and still 
well protected; protesting that he would not 
take any step that might hereafter render his 
conduct liable to misrepresentation. Had the 
prince then lifted up his hand, the regency, 
and eventually the crown, would have been 
his own : Spain would have been saved from 
the horrors of a long and sanguinary civil war. 
But where is the man who does not respect 
the prince's motives of action — who does not 
admire the disinterestedness with which he 
refused a sceptre already within his grasp]" 

The Cortes never was assembled to deliberate 
on the alteration of the order of succession, or 
consent to it; but a limited number of crea- 
tures of the court (seventy-six in number) 
were convoked in June 20, 1833, to swear alle- 
giance to the king's daughter, as a princess 
whose title to the throne was unquestionable. 
A protest was on that occasion taken by the 
Neapolitan and Sardinian ambassadors against 
the change, on grounds apparently unanswer- 
able.* And even all the efforts and influence 
of the court could not give a national charac- 
ter to the ceremony, or dispel the gloomy pre- 
sentiments with which even the humblest of 
the spectators were inspired. 

" Seventy-six popular delegates had been 
summoned," says Walton, " to take part in a 
dumb show, at a moment when two of the 
most important questions which ever present- 
ed themselves to public consideration agitated 
the country. The legality of the alteration in 
the law of succession, and the appointment of 
a regent in case of the king's death, were 
points which, everybody thought, ought to 
have been submitted to the Cortes, if such was 
the character of the meeting just dissolved. 
The world had been ostentatiously informed 
that, when those of 1789 met for the purpose 
of acknowledging the Prince of Asturias, the 
question of succession was introduced, and 
this circumstance, after the lapse of nearly 
half a centur}', made a plea for the establish- 
ment of a new rule : why then all this silence 
now, in defiance of public opinion? The 
queen, at the moment, was supreme, and her 
rival a voluntary exile in a foreign land. 
Every precaution had also been adopted to se- 
cure the return of deputies, if not favourable 
to her views, at least belonging to the Move- 
ment party ; and the capital was besides 
crowded with troops. And yet the queen and 
her advisers had. not the courage to trust the deci- 



* "The law of 1713 was enacted by the chief of a new 
dynasty, with all the formalities that were requisite and 
indispensable to its validity, and at a time when a con- 
currence of extraordinary and distressing circumstances 
justified the propriety of a new law of succession ; that 
it is a law consecrated by more than a century of unin- 
terrupted existence; that it was the necessary conse- 
quence of the stipulations which secured the throne of 
Spain to the grandson of Louis XIV., and to his male 
descendants, and that the weighty reasons in which it 
originated continue to subsist. 

" We have further considered, that an order of suc- 
cession established as this was, by the consent and 
under the guarantee of the principal powers of Europe, 
and recognised successively in various treaties con- 
cluded with those powers, has become obligatory and 
unalterable, and has transmitted to all the descendants 
of Philip V. rights which, as they were obtained by the 
sacrifice of other rights, they cannot relinquish without 
material injury to themselves, and without failing in 
the consideration due to the illustrious head and found- 
er of their dynasty." 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



339 



tion of two plain questions to a meeting of their 
own calling ; fearful that among its members 
some lurking royalist might be found to ex- 
pose their injustice, and argue the illegality 
of their acts. Any sympathies then excited in 
favour of the Infante, might have been ruinous 
to a cause only half consolidated. It therefore 
became necessary to carry on the delusion, by 
again resorting to sophistry, tergiversation, 
and calumny." 

Meanwhile, however, every effort was made 
to fill all offices of trust in the army and civil 
department with liberals of known resolution 
and determined character, who then found 
themselves, to their infinite joy, in conse- 
quence of the disputed succession they had 
contrived to get up to the throne, reinstated a 
third time in the possession of that authority 
from which they had been twice chased by the 
experienced evils of their sway, and the gene- 
ral indignation of the people. In a few months 
their preparations were complete. Such had 
been their activity, that all the offices in the 
state ; all the fortresses in the country ; all 
the commands in the army, were in their 
hands. At the same time Don Carlos was 
banished; his adherents discouraged; his 
cause to all appearance desperate. Suddenly 
reinforced, through the intrigues of the queen 
for her daughter, by the whole weight of Go- 
vernment, the Revolutionists had completely 
regained their ascendant. Yet, even in these 
circumstances, such was their unpopularity 
in consequence of the numberless corrupt and 
atrocious acts of which they had been guilty, 
that all these preparations would have been 
unavailing to force an unpopular and revolu- 
tionary change of government on the country, 
had it not been for the instant and powerful 
support which the Liberals in Spain received 
on the death of Ferdinand from the democratic 
government of France and England. 

" Ferdinand died," says Walton, " on 29th 
September, 1833. The account of his decease 
was transmitted to Paris by telegraph, and the 
next day a courier departed with orders to M. 
de Rayneval to declare that the French govern- 
ment was disposed to acknowledge the young 
princess as soon as the official notification of 
the demise of the crown arrived. This step had 
doubtless been agreed upon with the British 
government, in anticipation of an event long ex- 
pected ; and to this joint determination, and the 
immediate announcement of it in the Madrid 
Gazette, it was that the queen chiefly owed the 
ascendency which she gained in the first period 
of her regency. At that time the eyes of all 
Spain were upon England and France. They, 
as it were, held the balance in their own hands ; 
for the numerous and influential Spaniards, 
who were disposed to assert the rights of the 
lawful heir, intimidated by the extensive pre- 
parations of the government, and discouraged 
by the absence of their natural leader, held 
back from any attempt against the usurped 
power of the regent, through fear that for the 
moment opposition would be fruitless. Many 
colonels of regiments intrusted with command 
— even some liberals of the old school, sensible 
that the country was on the eve of a civil war, 
hesitated, and only joined the queen's cause 



when they saw it pompously proclaimed that 
England and France had declared in her favour 
and thrown their powerful aid into her scale." 

"The British and French governments may 
be said to have then assumed the right to 
did ate to Spain icho shotild reign over her ; and, as 
if it was not enough to have appointed to the 
throne, to have taken upon themselves to name 
a regent; for it is impossible to believe that 
the governments of the two countries which 
most contributed to the settlement effected by 
Philip V. were really convinced of the legality 
of the last measures of Ferdinand VII. to annul 
that settlement; or that, with their boasted 
attachment to the principles of a limited mo- 
narchy, they could be sincere in professing a 
belief that the mere testamentary provision of 
an uxorious and enfeebled king could disin- 
herit the rightful heir to the throne, and sub- 
vert the fundamental laws of his country." 

The result of this possession of the treasury, 
the seat of government, the army, with their 
powerful foreign support, is well known. The 
queen was proclaimed throughout the king- 
dom, and although partial risings in favour of 
Don Carlos took place in almost every pro- 
vince, yet as that prince was in exile, and his 
adherents unarmed and scattered, they were 
without difficulty suppressed by the military 
force, 100,000 strong, now at the disposal of 
the Liberals. But as Mr. Walton justly ob- 
serves, 

"The Spaniards in the end will redress their 
own wrongs. They will not submit to insult 
and proscription ; the popular thunder will 
never cease to roll until the confederacy formed 
between the Spanish liberals and their foreign 
allies is dissolved for ever. Already, indeed, 
are the oppressors of 1823 and 1833, treading 
on a terrible volcano, surrounded by every 
sign of past ravage and impending explosion. 
Neither the queen, nor the party by which she 
is upheld, has any hold upon the confidence 
or affections of the Spanish people : the views 
of the one, in endeavouring to secure the 
throne to her daughter by an outrage upon her 
late husband's memory, are too unjust and too 
revolting to prosper; whilst the object of the 
others, in seizing upon power for a third time, 
is as apparent now as it was before. Were 
the liberals really friends of constitutional 
order — known for their adherence to settled 
systems of reform — aisposed to admit changes 
founded upon principles of tried merit — taught 
by experience and adversity to prefer plans 
of a practical character and easy results to 
dangerous theories and extravagant notions — 
in a Avord, were they prepared to sacrifice 
their party prejudices to the general wants 
and wishes of the country, they might still 
have repaired their former errors and spared 
the effusion of blood. 

" So far, their cry for freedom has only been 
another name for social disorganization. — 
their return to power the commencement of an 
uncontrolled career of outrage and murder. Their 
official existence seems to depend on the 
repetition of previous follies and crimes. 
Place and pelf in their opinion cannot be 
secured unless the Revolution is completed by 
i the utter extermination of the royalists : they 



340 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



equally disregard the laws and the public 
voice. The Spaniards have always evinced a 
scrupulous respect for ancient forms, as well 
as an aversion to changes to their institutions ; 
and now they are told that they must have 
nothing that does not bear a modern stamp. 
They have been distinguished beyond other 
nations by a jealous love of their country and 
a horror of foreign dictation ; but they are 
now informed that they must be satisfied with 
such rulers, and such a form of government, as 
the liberals of London and Paris may be graciously 
pleased to bestow on them. In one breath they 
are branded as ignorant and prejudiced bigots, 
and in the next called upon to admit changes 
of a refined kind long before society is in a 
state to receive them." 

The civil war soon after commenced in 
Navarre, and we again pray the particular 
attention of our readers to the mingled perfidy 
and cruelty by which, from the very first, it was 
distinguished by the queen's forces : a cruelty 
so atrocious, and uniformly adhered to, as to 
have rendered altogether unavoidable the 
frightful reprisals which have ever since pre- 
vailed in the Peninsula. Lorenzo was the 
Christino general in Navarre — Santos Ladron 
the popular leader. The former, fearful of the 
issue of the contest, privately conveyed a 
message to Don Santos, signifying his wish 
to have a conference to prevent the effusion of 
blood. 

" This message was cordially received, and 
in an unguarded moment Don Santos agreed 
to meet his adversary, judging by this step that 
he was promoting the interests of humanity 
and the advancement of the cause which he 
had so fervently embraced. Without a written 
engagement or previous formality, a private 
meeting was agreed upon, and the two gene- 
rals, with their respective staffs and a few at- 
tendants, proceeded to the appointed spot, a 
short distance beyond Los Arcos. 

" Santos Ladron endeavoured to persuade 
Lorenzo that he was wrong in supporting the 
queen's cause; and in the most feeling man- 
ner pointed out the calamities in which the 
country was about to be involved, it being 
evident that the laws and the great majority 
of the people were in favour of Charles V. He 
alluded to the unfortunate contest of 1820, 
which, he said, was about to be renewed. He 
appealed to Lorenzo's patriotism and religion, 
and, as one older in rank and more experi- 
enced, implored him to spare the effusion of 
blood. Finding that he could make no im- 
pression upon tne queen's representative, 
Santos Ladron reined his horse and was about 
to withdraw, when Lorenzo's people fired upon 
him. His horse fell, and as he was extricat- 
ing himself from his stirrup, the flaps of his 
frock-coat flew open, and underneath dis- 
covered the general's sash. The sight of the 
insignia of his rank inflamed the rapacity of 
the Christinos, and they rushed upon the dis- 
mounted chieftain, eager to gain so valuable a 
prize and the corresponding reward. Santos 
Ladron, who had been already wounded by 
ihe treacherous fire of the Christinos, was 
conveyed to Pamplona, and, without being ad- 
mitted to a hearing, was, with thirty-two of 



his companions, subjected to the mockery of 
a court-martial and condemned to death. In 
vain the provincial deputation and the Bishop 
of Pamplona implored the viceroy and the 
military governor to suspend the execution 
till the matter could be referred to Madrid ; 
all intercession was vain. It was answered 
that the formalities of a court-martial had been 
fully observed, and it was now impossible to 
alter the sentence. In reality, the authorities 
were eager to recommend themselves to the 
Madrid government by executing with pre- 
cipitate activity the orders of a remorseless 
policy, and they were well aware that nothing 
could be more distasteful to their employers than 
any hesitation in discharging the bloody service that 
was required at their hands. On the 15th of 
October the wounded general, with his thirty-two 
companions, was led into the ditch of the fortress, 
and there privately shot." 

The effect of this atrocity may be easily 
conceived. 

" The perfidious massacre of thirty-three 
persons at once proclaimed to Spain and Eu- 
rope the faithless and remorseless character 
of the government that sanctioned and re- 
warded the horrid deed ; as a measure of inti- 
midation it utterly failed, nay, rather fanned 
the flame which it was intended to extinguish. 
The very night after the execution five hun- 
dred persons, mostly youths of the best fami- 
lies in Pamplona, quitted the place, and joined 
the Carlists of Roncesvalles. The next day 
Colonel Benito Eraso, who had raised the val- 
ley of Roncesvalles, issued a proclamation to 
the inhabitants and an address to the soldiers. 
In the former, after begging those whom he 
addressed not to be discouraged by the misfor- 
tune of Santos Ladron, he added, 'No ven- 
geance ! oblivion of the past, and a religious 
observance of the decree of amnesty ! Let 
order, union, and valour be your motto, and 
triumph is certain.' A noble contrast to the 
barbarous atrocities which his enemies had 
not only the heart to perpetrate, but the shame- 
lessness to avow." 

Saarsfield, another of the queen's generals, 
though of a more mild and pacific character, 
was nevertheless constrained, by his orders 
from Madrid, to begin the war with the same 
system of reckless butchery. 

" It was well known," says Walton, " that he 
did not belong to the revolutionary school, 
and the very names of many of those who, 
fresh from the exile to which Ferdinand had 
consigned them, were now employed to second 
his own operations, must have enabled him, 
long before he crossed the Ebro, to judge of 
the probable course of impending changes, 
and have filled him with mingled feelings of 
discontent and apprehension. He was, how- 
ever, carried away by events ; and the ease 
with which his advantages were gained, did 
not restrain his troops from marking their pro- 
gress by acts of violence, and the wanton effu- 
sion of blood. His orders, doubtless, were 
severe, and too peremptory to be trifled with ; 
while the more active and ambitious of his 
officers must have been allured by the rewards 
bestowed on the bloody deed of Lorenzo, to 
imitate his barbarous example, and to adapt 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



341 



their mode of warfare to the taste prevailing 
in the capital. Every Carlist chieftain, taken in 
arms, was accordingly shot without mercy ; the 
same severity was extended to the less respon- 
sible peasantry, and the most unsparing efforts 
were made to extinguish the hopes of Charles 
V. in the blood of every class of his adherents ; 
a merciless, and at the same time impolitic 
rigour, by which fuel was added to a half- 
extinguished flame, and the discontent of a 
bold and warlike population converted into 
the most bitter and desperate hostility." 

These inhuman massacres, however, did not 
intimidate the Carlists : but wherever they 
rose in arms, the same execrable system of 
murder was pursued by the queen's generals. 

"The Carlists," says our author, "one and 
all, felt that faith had not been kept with them; 
that the proclamations of the queen's officers 
were only intended to entrap the unwary, and 
that their real aim was extermination. 

"The cries of fresh victims constantly re- 
sounded in their ears, and they continued to 
shudder at the remembrance of the butcheries 
which they had already witnessed. Brigadier 
Tina, who had been captured and his band 
dispersed, was on the 26th November shot 
near Alcaniz. At Calatayud twenty-one Carlists 
had previously met with the same fate, and 
among them two ecclesiastics, a fact sufficient 
to show the brutalizing effects of the new sys- 
tem. Morella was entered on the 13th Decem- 
ber, after a close investment by General Bu- 
tron, the governor of Tortosa, but the Carlist 
garrison escaped, and were afterwards over- 
taken at Calanda, near Alcaniz, when their 
commander, Baron Herves, his wife and three 
children, fell into the hands of the queen's 
troops. Agreeably to an order of the day, 
published by Viceroy Espeleta, the comman- 
der of the royalist volunteers of Torreblanca, 
D. Cristoval Fuste, and D. Pedro Torre, were 
shot at Zaragoza, in the morning of the 23d 
December; and on the 27th, Baron Herves, 
and D. Vicente Gil, commander of the royalist 
volunteers, shared the same fate. At Vitoria, 
the son of a rich merchant, for whose ransom 
five thousand dollars were offered, was also 
shot by the orders of Valdes, at a moment 
when a courier from Madrid could not pass 
without a large escort." 

And now the queen's government, embol- 
dened by the success with which they had 
hitherto butchered and massacred whoever 
appeared in arms against them, resolved on a 
still more sweeping and unjustifiable act of 
democratic despotism. This was the destruc- 
tion of the liberties and rights of the whole Basrjuc 
provinces, and the extinction of the freedom 
which had prevailed in the mountains of Na- 
varre and Biscay for six hundred years. It is 
unnecessary to say what these privileges were. 
All the world knows that these provinces were 
in truth a free constitutional monarchy, in- 
serted into the despotic realm of Spain; that 
their popular rights were more extensive than 
those of England under the Reform Bill; that 
they exceeded even the far-famed democratic 
privileges of the Swiss Cantons. For that very 
reason they were odious to the democratic 
despots at Madrid, who could tolerate no re- 



straint whatever on their authority, and least 
of all from freeborn mountaineers, who had 
inherited their privileges from their fathers, 
and not derived them from their usurpation. 
Like their predecessors in the French Direc- 
tory with the Swiss Cantons, they had accord- 
ingly from the very first devoted these liberties 
to destruction, and they seized the first oppor- 
tunity of success to carry their tyrannical 
determination into execution. 

"As soon," says Walton, "as the queen's 
military commanders had established their 
authority, they declared the Basque fueros provi- 
sionally suspcndal. For some time past the 
Madrid government had wished to place these 
provinces under the Castilian law, by carrying 
the line of customs to their extreme frontiers, 
and the present opportunity was thought fa- 
vourable. On the 3d December, Castanon 
issued a proclamation from his head-quarters 
at Tolosa, of which the following are the prin- 
cipal clauses : — ' If, after a lapse of eight days, 
arms are found in any house, the master shall 
be subject* to a fine and other penalties; and 
should he have no means of payment, con- 
demned to two years' hard labour at the hulks 
— any individual concealing ammunition, mo- 
ney, or other effects belonging to an insurgent, 
shall be shot — the house of any person who may 
have fired upon the queen's troops shall be 
burnt — every peasant forming one of an as- 
semblage of less than fifty men, and taken in 
arms at a quarter of a league from the high- 
road, shall be considered as a brigand and shot — 
any one intercepting a government courier 
shall be shot — every village that shall, without 
opposition, suffer the insurgents to obtain re- 
cruits, shall be punished with a heavy contri- 
bution — all the property of absentees shall be 
confiscated — every peasant refusing to convey 
information from the municipalities to head- 
quarters shall be put in irons, and condemned 
to two years' imprisonment, or hard labour, in 
the fortress of St. Sebastian — all women who, 
by word or deed, favour the rebellion, shall be 
closely confined — a court-martial shall be 
formed to take cognisance of all causes 
brought before them, and every movable 
column shall have with it one member of this 
court for the purpose of carrying into effect 
the provisions of this proclamation.' 

" The brutal edict was read with horror and 
disgust. Such of the natives as had embraced 
the queen's cause now bitterly repented of 
their error when they saw their privileges 
trampled under foot by a military despot, and 
found themselves obliged to receive into their 
houses, and furnish with every necessary, the 
soldiers who protected him in his outrageous 
exercise of illegal power. The mere mention 
of their fueros being suspended, produced a 
magical effect, and the Basques now consider- 
ed their cause more than ever sanctified. 
Many who before had remained neutral flew 
to arms, and the war-cry resounded along the 
mountain ranges. Surrounded by rocks and 
precipices, the Basque patriots assembled to 
consider their prospects, and devise revenge 
for their wrongs. The hardy peasantry re- 
solved to suffer the last extremities of war 
rather than submit to the yoke with which 
2 f 2 



842 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



they were threatened. They required no oath 
of secrecy, no pledges for each other's fidelity. 
They called to mind the heroic efforts of their 
ancestors to resist oppression ; and holding up 
the printed paper circulated among them, in 
scorn and in abhorrence, they swore to defend 
their freedom, and mutually bound each other, 
as the sword was already unsheathed, never to 
return it to the scabbard till their fueros were 
acknowledged and secured." 

Human cruelty, it might have been thought, 
could hardly have gone beyond the atrocities 
already committed by the revolutionary gene- 
rals; but they were exceeded by that perpe- 
trated in the endeavour to crush this gallant 
effort of the Basque peasants to rescue from 
destruction Biscayan freedom. 

"Zavala (a Biscay chief) having seized 
five noted Christinos, took them to his head- 
quarters at Ganteguiz de Arteaga, a small 
town on the east of the river Mundaca, where 
he treated them with respect. In retaliation, 
the enemy sent a detachment of six hundred 
men from Bilboa to Murguia, to seize his 
family; after which the same corps advanced 
upon his position with his children placed in their 
foremost rank. Zavala was struck with horror 
at this revolting expedient, and hesitated be- 
tween his duty as a soldier and paternal ten- 
derness. If an engagement ensued, his own 
children would inevitably fall before their 
father's musketry. In this dreadful dilemma, 
and hoping still to defeat the enemy without 
submitting to the cruel necessity of destroying 
the dearest portion of himself, Zavala with- 
drew to Guernica. Here he was attacked the 
next day by the same troops, who again ad- 
vanced with his children in front of their co- 
lumn. The same torture awaited the distract- 
ed parent. He placed his troops in an advan- 
tageous position, and the fire commenced 
under the tree of Guernica, that glorious sign 
of proud recollections to the sons of Biscay — 
the tree under which they swear fidelity to 
their liege lord, and where he binds himself 
in turn to keep their privileges inviolate. 
Victory crowned the efforts of the Biscayan 
royalists, and scarcely more than a third of 
the queen's troops escaped. The devoted vic- 
tims of the atrocious assailants were saved, 
and restored to the arms of an agonized 
father." 

The extent to which these early massacres 
by the revolutionists was carried, was very 
great. 

"It was about this time estimated," says our 
author, " that not less than twelve hundred persons 
had been put to the sword or executed in the Basque 
provinces and Navarre alone, besides the many 
victims sacrificed in other parts of the king- 
dom. For three months the queen's agents 
had oeen playing a deceitful and desperate 
game. They respected no laws, and even 
broke the promises contained in their own 
proclamations. Hence numbers who had laid 
down their arms, and returned to their homes, 
again banded together, filled with the most 
exasperated and vindictive feelings; and if in 
this state of mind they resorted to acts of re- 
taliation, those whose previous cruelties pro- 
voked such severities .are justly answerable 



for the excesses of the Carlists as well as for 
their own. The horrible atrocities of the 
queen's partisans gave the contest a deadly 
and ferocious character ; and, as if the former 
severities had not been sufficient, fuel was 
added to the flame by a decree issued by the 
queen-regent, and bearing date the 21st of 
January, in which it was ordered, that all pri- 
vates, belonging to the several factions, who 
might not have been shot, should be employed 
in the condemned regiments of Ceuta, Cuba, 
Porto Rico, and the Phillippine Islands, at the 
same time that the officers were to be punished 
with the utmost severity of the law." 

Nay, so resolute were the revolutionists on 
carrying on the war on no other principle than 
that of indiscriminate massacre, that it was 
repeatedly announced in official proclamations 
as the rule of war by the queen's generals. 

"On the 5th August, 1834, Rodil issued a 
proclamation," in which he said, " ' that after 
employing all possible means of clemency, he 
is convinced that severe chastisement alone 
can put an end to the rebel faction; wherefore 
he decrees, 1st, that every one found in the ranks 
of the rebels shall be shot as soon as taken ; 2d, those 
who supply arms, favour their attempts, or 
obey their summons, shall be equally shot,' &c. 
This edict is dated Pamplona, and the strictest 
orders were circulated to carry it into full 
effect." 

All attempts on the part of the Carlists to 
establish a more humane system of warfare 
were in vain. One in particular deserves to 
be mentioned. In one of Zumalacarregui's 
victories, a Spanish nobleman of high rank 
was made prisoner. 

"On the first leisure moment, Zumalacar- 
regui examined his prisoners, and more espe- 
cially the count. The Carlist chieftain was 
pleased with his manly behaviour; and, after 
several inquiries as to the state of affairs at 
Madrid, promised to propose an exchange of 
prisoners, in which the count's rank was to be 
waived. In the mean while the count was 
invited to Zumalacarregui's table, and treated 
with every consideration. A few days after- 
wards, whilst at dinner, Rodil's answer to the 
proposed cartel arrived, in which he stated 
that the prisoners for whom it was wished to 
make an exchange had been already shot. ' Here, 
count,' said the Carlist leader, ' take the letter 
of your queen's commander: read it yourself, 
and then judge the situation in which I am 
placed.' 

" The unfortunate count turned pale, and 
with a start pushed his plate almost to the 
middle of the table. The repast was at once 
at an end. After a pause, during which a dead 
silence prevailed, Zumalacarregui, addressing 
the weeping count, added, ' I wished to spare 
you, and such also I know would be my sove- 
reign's wish ; but with such enemies forbear- 
ance is impossible. From the first I looked 
upon you as a deluded youth, of an ardent 
mind, and I should have rejoiced in being the 
instrument of royal mercy ; but Rodil's out- 
rages are beyond endurance, they must and 
shall be checked. Were I considerate towards 
you, our enemies, as they have done before, 
would attribute my conduct to weakness. This 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



343 



triumph they shall not obtain. The widows' 
weeds worn in these provinces will tell you the state 
of the ivar better tha7i all you heard in Madrid.' 1 " 

Not content with the wholesale murders thus 
carried into execution on women and children 
of the adverse party, the democrats in the 
Spanish great towns resolved to take the work 
of the butcher in their own hands, and enjoy 
in their own persons the exquisite pleasure of 
putting to death their captive enemies. At 
Zaragoza, thirteen monks were murdered; at 
C'onlova, several convents burnt: at Valencia 
the mob were only appeased by the sacrifice 
of six Carlists, who were massacred in cold 
blood. At Barcelona, the atrocities were still 
more frightful. 

"On the afternoon of the 25th July, 1835, a 
mob, arrayed in various bands, each headed 
by a leader in disguise, paraded the streets 
with cries of ' Away to the Convents !' and 
' Death to the friars !' and forthwith proceeded 
from words to deeds. Six convents (namely, 
those of the Augustins, of the Trinitarians, of 
the two orders of Carmelites, of the Minims, 
and of the Dominicans) were blazing at once, 
and soon were reduced to heaps of smoking 
ruins ; while eighty of their unfortunate inmates 
perished, some burned in the buildings, others 
poniarded, and others again beaten to death 
with clubs and stones. Some escaped through 
the exertions of the artillery corps, and a few 
by mingling in disguise with the crowd. Three 
hundred friars and clergymen took refuge in 
the castle of Monjuich, and as many more in 
the citadel and fort Atarzanzas. The military 
meanwhile paraded the streets, but remained 
perfectly passive, having received orders not to 
fire on the populace. Llauder, the captain- 
general, fled into France, and left the city vir- 
tually in the power of the rabble." 

Subsequently the savage temper of the Bar- 
celona liberals was evinced in a still more 
memorable manner : — 

"On the 4th of January, 1836, a crowd 
assembled in the main square, and, with loud 
imprecations and yells of revenge, demanded 
the lives of the Carlist prisoners confined in 
the citadel. Thither they immediately re- 
paired, and, not meeting with the slightest re- 
sistance from the garrison, scaled the walls, 
lowered the draw-bridge, and entered the 
fortress ; their leaders holding in their hands 
lists of those whom they had predetermined to 
massacre. When the place was completely 
in their possession, the leaders of the mob 
began to read over their lists of proscription, 
and, with as much deliberation as if they had 
been butchers selecting sheep for the knife, 
had their miserable victims dragged forward, 
and shot one after another, in the order of their 
names. The brave Colonel O'Donnel was the 
first that perished. His body, and that of 
another prisoner, were dragged through the 
streets, with shouts of 'Liberty!' The heads 
and hands were cut off, and the mutilated 
trunks, after having been exposed to every 
indignity, were cast upon a burning pile. The 
head of O'Donnel, after having been kicked 
about the streets as a foot-ball by wretches 
who mingled mirth with murder, was at last 
stuck up in front of a fountain ; and pieces of 



Jlcsh were cut from his mangled and palpitating 
body, and eagerly devoured by the vilest and most 
depraved of women. From the citadel the mob 
proceeded to the hospital, where three of the 
inmates were butchered; and from the hospital 
to the fort of Atanzares, where fifteen Carlist 
peasants shared the same fate. In all, eighty- 
eight persons perished. 

" This deliberate massacre of defenceless 
prisoners, and the worse than fiendish excesses 
committed on their remains, satisfied the 
rioters for the first day ; but, on the next, they 
presumed to proclaim that fruitful parent of 
innumerable murders — the constitution of 
1812. This was too much to be borne. Even 
then, however, two hours elapsed before a 
dissenting voice was heard; when a note 
arrived from Captain Hyde Parker, of the 
Rodney, who not long before, in obedience to 
the orders of a peaceful administration, had 
landed fifteen thousand 7nuskcls in the city. His 
offer to support the authorities against the 
friends of the obnoxious constitution was not 
without effect. The leaders of the political 
movement were allowed to embark on board 
the Rodney, and the tumult subsided, rather 
from being lulled than suppressed. No pun- 
ishment whatever was inflicted on the murder- 
ers and cannibals of the first day; their con- 
duct, perhaps, was not considered to deserve 
any. 

" It was expected that when the riots of Bar- 
celona were known at Zaragoza, the rabble of 
the latter city would have broken out into 
similar excesses ; but the authorities had re- 
course to the same disgraceful expedient to 
appease them which had proved successful 
before. They ordered four. officers, a priest, 
and two peasants, reputed Carlists, to be 
strangled, and thus prevented the populace 
from becoming murderers, by assuming that 
character themselves." 

The humane philanthropists of the capital 
were not behind their provincial brethren in 
similar exploits. 

"The first victim was a Franciscan friar 
who happened to be on the street. A report 
was then spread that the Jesuits had advised 
the deed ; and the senseless mob, frantic for 
revenge, rushed to the college. The gate hav- 
ing been forced open, the first person who 
entered was one dressed in the uniform of the 
urban-militia, who told the students to quit the 
house, as it was not in search of them that 
they came. 

"Instantly the college was filled with an 
armed mob, thirsting for blood, and the mas- 
sacre began. Professor Bastan was bayoneted, 
and Father Ruedas stabbed to death. The 
professor of history and geography, Father 
Saun, was next murdered, and his head beat 
to pieces with clubs and hammers. The pro- 
fessor of rhetoric was dragged from his hiding- 
place, and that he might be the sooner de- 
spatched, knives were added to the murderous 
weapons which had been before emptoyea. 
Another master, endeavouring to escape, was 
fired upon by an nrbano ; and as the shot 
missed, he was bayoneted in the back. Three 
in disguise escaped into the streets, hoping by 
this means to save their lives ; but they were 



344 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



murdered by the mob, to whom regular com- 
munications were made of what was passing 
inside the building. On every side were 
heard the groans of the dying, the screams of 
those who were vainly endeavouring to es- 
cape, the discharge of muskets, and the ex- 
ulting shouts of the murderers. The students 
had been driven from these scenes of horror ; 
but several returned, in the hope of befriending 
their masters. One child threw his slender 
form over the prostrate body of his preceptor, 
and shared in the wounds under which he 
breathed his last. 

"In one house perished fifteen individuals, 
assassinated in the most barbarous manner by 
those actually employed and armed to keep 
the public peace, some in regimentals and 
others in disguise. The provincial regiment 
of Granada then formed part of the Madrid 
garrison ; and the officers and men belonging 
to it, who were not passive spectators, appeared 
among the murderers. The death of their 
victims was not sufficient to satiate the fury 
of the rioters : some had their entrails torn out, 
others were dragged through the streets with 
ropes round their necks, and acts of cannibal- 
ism were perpetrated so abominable and dis- 
gusting that it is impossible to enter into their 
loathsome details. The Franciscan convent 
and other places were the scenes of similar 
atrocities. These unhappy victims of ruthless 
liberalism perverting to its own ends the blind- 
ness of the multitude, had taken no part in 
politics ; their only crime was that they were 
clergymen and instructors of youth." 

Amidst these hideous atrocities, the Madrid 
liberals, and the Cadiz and Barcelona cliques, 
have steadily, and amidst the loud applause of 
their hungry dependents, pursued the usual 
selfish objects of democratic ambition. All 
useful establishments, all which relieved or 
blessed the poor were rooted out, new offices 
and jurisdictions were created in every di- 
rection, numberless commissions were issued; 
and the well-paid liberals began to roll in their 
carriages, and keep their boxes at the opera. 
The property of the Church, which in Spain is 
literally the endowment at once of education 
and the poor, was the first to be rooted out. 
Its character and usefulness is thus described 
by our author : — 

"The convents in Spain are not like those 
which we had among us in Catholic times; 
and their suppression will necessarily excite 
indignation, besides giving rise to great abuses. 
They mostly partook of the character of the 
hospice, particularly in the northern provinces. 
To the peasants they often served as banking 
establishments, and greatly favoured agricul- 
tural improvements. The friars acted as 
schoolmasters, advocates, physicians, and 
apothecaries. Besides feeding and clothing 
the poor, and visiting the sick, they afforded 
spiritual consolation. They were considerate 
landlords and indulgent masters. They were 
peace-makers in domestic broils ; and if a 
harvest failed, they supplied the seed that was 
to be confided to the earth the next year. They 
also provided periodical amusements and fes- 
tivities, which the peasant will see abandoned 
with regret. Most of the convents had funda- 



cionea, or endowments, for professors who 
taught rhetoric, philosophy, &c, besides keep- 
ing schools open for the poor. They also 
supplied curates when wanted, and their 
preachers are considered the best in Spain. 

"Without entering into the question of the 
legality of these suppressions, or pointing out 
the folly of a government proceeding to such 
extremes that is not sure of its own existence 
for half a year, it may be stated, that all the 
expedients resorted to in our Henry VIII.' s time 
to bring the monastic orders into disrepute, 
have been practised by the Spanish liberals, 
and have failed. On the 19th January, 1836, 
the monks in Madrid were driven out of their 
convents at two o'clock in the morning, with- 
out the slightest regard to age or infirmity. 
After being grossly insulted and reviled, 
several were waylaid in the streets by the rayo, 
or thunderbolt party, and cudgelled in the most 
unmerciful manner. The measure of eject- 
ment was simultaneously carried into exe- 
cution wherever the government could enforce 
its commands ; the great object in view being 
to seize on money, plate, and valuables. 

" The liberals have appointed commissions to 
receive the confiscated properly, and the same 
abuses occur as in 1822. One instance will 
suffice in the way of illustration. The convent 
of St. John of God, at Cadiz, well known to 
many of our countrymen, formerly fed and 
clothed a large number of poor; and its mem- 
bers, being mostly medical men, attended the 
sick and administered medicine gratis. The 
relief afforded by this institution was incalcu- 
lable; and yet its funds, economically adminis- 
tered, and added only by voluntary donations, 
were sufficient to satisfy every claim. The 
liberals took its administration upon them- 
selves ; and the persons intrusted with it soon 
grew rich and had their Lojccs at the theatre. They 
had profits on the contracts for provisions, 
medicine, and other supplies. The amount of 
relief afforded was also diminished; and yet, 
at the end of the first year, the ordinary funds 
were exhausted, and the new administrators 
obliged to make public appeals to the hu- 
mane." 

The destitution thus inflicted on the clergy, 
and misery on the poor, has been unbounded. 

" The suppression lately ordained by the 
Christino government may be called a general 
one, and the number of establishments to which 
it had extended at the end of last September, 
was estimated at 1937, leaving 23,699 ejected 
inmates, whose annual maintenance, if paid at 
the promised rate, would not be less than 
400,000/." 

The creation of new jurisdictions, and the 
extirpation of all the ancient landmarks, was 
as favourite an object with the Spanish as it 
had been with the French, or now is with the 
English revolutionists. 

"The plan for the territorial divisions was 
also put forward. It may be here proper to 
to observe, that formerly Spain was divided 
into fourteen sections, unequal in extent and 
population. It was now proposed to divide the 
territory, including the adjacent islands, into 
forty-nine provinces, or districts, taking the 
names of their respective capitals, except Na- 



CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN. 



varre, Biscay, Guipuscoa, and Alava, which 
were to preserve their ancient denominations. 
The principality of Asturias was to become 
the province of Oviedo. Andalusia was to be 
parcelled out into seven provinces; Aragon, 
into three ; New Castile, into five ; Old Castile, 
into eight; Catalonia, into four; Estremadura, 
into two; Galicia, into four; Leon, into three; 
Murcia, into two; and Valencia, into three. 
To each it was wished to give as near as pos- 
sible a population of 250,000 persons ; and the 
census taken in 1833, amounting to 12,280,000 
souls, was taken for a standard. A new 
magistrate, called sub-delegate, was to be 
appointed to each province, and act under 
the immediate orders of the minister Del Fo- 
mento." 

And it is to support such a cause that the 
Quadruple Alliance was formed, and Lord I 
John Hay, and the gallant marines of England ■ 
sent out, and 500,000/. worth of arms and 
ammunition furnished to the revolutionary 
government! Lord Palmerston says all this 
was done, because it is for the interest of England 
to promote the establishment of liberal insti- 
tutions in all the adjoining states. Is it, then, 
for the "interest of England" to establish uni- 
versal suffrage, a single chamber, and a power- 
less throne, in the adjoining countries, in order 
that the reflection of their lustre there may 
tend to their successful introduction into this 
realm .' Is it for the interest, any more than 
the honour of England, to ally itself with a set 
of desperadoes, assassins, and murderers, and 
to promote, by all the means in its power, the 
extinction of liberty in those seats of virtuous 
institutions — the Basque provinces ? What 
has been the return which the liberals of Lis- 
bon have made for the aid which placed their 
puppet on the throne, and gave them the com- 
mand of the whole kingdom ? To issue a 
decree raising threefold the duties on every 
species of British manufacture. A similar 
result may with certainty be anticipated, after 
all the blood and treasure we have wasted, and 
more than all the character we have lost, from 
Evans's co-operation, if he shall succeed in 
beating down the Carlist cause ; because the 
urban democracy, which will then be estab- 
lished in uncontrolled power, will be neces- 
sarily actuated by the commercial passions 
and jealousy of that class in society. 

One word more in regard to the Durango 
decree, on which such vehement efforts have 
been made to rouse the sympathy and excite 
the indignation of the British people. None 
can deplore that decree more than we do ; none 
can more earnestly desire its repeal ; and if 
our humble efforts can be of any avail, we im- 
plore the counsellors of Don Carlos, for the 
sake of humanity, to stop its execution ; to ob- 
tain its repeal. But when it is said that it is 
such a stain upon the cause of the Spanish 
Conservatives, as renders their cause unworthy 
of the support of any good man, we are prompt- 
ed to ask what cause did the English merce- 
naries go out to support? Was it the cause 
of civilized, humane, legalized warfare? No! 
it was that of murder, robbery, and plunder, of 
massacred babes and weltering valleys, of 
conflagration, rapine, and extermination. They 
44 



voluntarily joined their standards to those of a 
power which had begun the infamous system 
of giving no quarter, and despite all the efforts 
of the Duke of Wellington's mission, hud re- 
sumed it, and was prosecuting it wiih relent- 
less rigour. They marched along with those 
exterminating bands, into valleys where they 
had burned every house, and slaughtered every 
second inhabitant, and clothed in weeds every 
mother and sister that survived. They march- 
ed along with these execrable bands, without 
any condition, without either proclaiming for 
themselves, or exacting from their allies any 
other and more humane system of warfare. 
By their presence, however inefficient they 
may have been on the Biscayan shore, they 
have prolonged for two years, beyond the pe- 
riod when it would otherwise have terminated, 
the heart-rending civil war of Spain. If the 
20,000 English and French auxiliaries, who 
retained an equal force of Carlists inactive in 
their front had been removed, can there be a 
doubt Don Carlos would have been on the 
throne, and peace established in Spain two 
years ago ? How many thousand of Spanish 
old men and women have been slaughtered, 
while Evans virtually held the hands of their 
avenging heroes ? We have thus voluntarily 
ranged ourselves beside a frightful exterminat- 
ing power; can we be surprised if we are met 
by the severities which his atrocities have 
rendered unavoidable ? We have joined hands 
with the murderer; though we may not have 
ourselves lifted the dagger, we have held the 
victim while our confederates plunged it in 
his heart, and can we be surprised if we are 
deemed fit objects of the terrible law of retri- 
bution? 

Do we then counsel aid to Don Carlos, or 
any assistance to the cause he supports ? Far 
from it: we would not that one Englishman 
should be exposed to the contagion of the hide- 
ous atrocities which the revolutionists have 
committed, and to which the Carlists, in self- 
defence, have been driven in every part of 
Spain. What we counsel is, what we have 
never ceased to urge ever since this hideous 
strife began in the Peninsula: Withdraw alto- 
gether from it : Bring home the marines, the 
auxiliaries, the steamboats; send no more arms 
or ammunition from the Tower ; declare to the 
Christinos, that till they return to the usages 
of civilized war we will not send them another 
gun under the quadruple treaty. It is a woful 
reflection, that our vast influence with the re- 
volutionary government, after the quadruple 
alliance, was perfectly adequate, if properly 
exerted, to have entirely stopt this exterminat- 
ing warfare. But what must be our reflection, 
when we recollect that we have actually sup- 
ported it ! And if hereafter a band of Cos- 
sacks or Pandours shall land on the coast of 
Kent, to perpetuate a bloody strife in the realms 
of England, to support the savage excesses of 
an Irish civil war, and spread mourning weeds 
and wo through every cottage in England, it 
is no more than we have done to the Biscay 
mountaineers, and no more than what, under 
a just retribution, we may expect to endure 
from some equally unjust and uncalled-for ag 
jrression. 



S4G 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



WELLINGTON; 



Mr Lord Provost, and gentlemen, I am 
not sorry this meeting is not unanimous — 
truth is, in the end, always best elicited by 
the conflict of opposite opinions, and those 
who came here to record their sentiments of 
the merits of the Duke of Wellington need 
never fear the freest discussion or the most 
searching inquiry. (Applause.) The gen- 
tlemen who are of an opposite way of think- 
ing were entitled to express their opinions. I 
have done my utmost to obtain for them a fair 
hearing — they have received it — their motion 
has been put and seconded — it has been carried 
against them by a large majority — and I now 
expect from the fair dealing of the opponents 
of the Duke of Wellington, the same patient 
hearing which we have given to them. (Loud 
cheers.) Gentlemen, I agree with part of 
what has been said by the mover of the coun- 
ter resolution proposed at this meeting. I ad- 
mit that war is a calamity, I deplore the fright- 
ful miseries which in every age have attended 
its footsteps, and I ardently wish from the bot- 
tom of my soul that the progress of religion 
and knowledge may eventually extinguish its 
horrors, that social conflicts may be carried 
on with the weapons of truth and argument, 
and not by fields of slaughter, and that the 
blood-stained glory of the conqueror may here- 
after be a tale only of the olden time. (Loud 
cheers from the Chartists.) But, gentlemen, 
you are to recollect that these blessings are 
only the hope of the philanthropist — those 
times have not yet arrived — these blessings are 
only yet in prospect, even to the most enthu- 
siastic friends of human improvement, and far 
less had these principles emerged in the days 
of Napoleon. It was neither by the school- 
master nor the press ; neither by education 
nor knowledge, that the legions of that mighty 
conqueror were to be withstood. (Loud ap- 
plause.) A tyranny, compared with which all 
that is now experienced or shared by men was 
as dust in the balance, then pressed upon the 
world, crushing nations by its weight — enslav- 
ing mankind by its chains. Against this tre- 
mendous power, reason, religion, compassion, 
and humanity, were alike impotent, — the cries 
of humanity were answered by discharges of 
artillery — the groans of the innocent by charges 
of cuirassiers. Are we to blame Wellington 
then 1 Is it a stigma on his name, because 
thrown into an age of Iron, he combated op- 

* Speech delivered at Glascow, February, 1840, when 
proposing the erection of a monument to "the Duke of 
Wellington in that city, in a public meeting called for 
that purpose. The cheers and interruptions are given 
an they appeared in the report of it next day, as the 
meeting was very stormy, from a strong body of Chart- 
ists who had taken possession of the centre of the room 
and endeavoured to drown the speaker's voice, which 
Ihey had done with the two immediately preceding 
speakers ; and a great part of the speech bore refer- 
ence to or was occasioned by these interruptions. 



pression by its own weapons — because, the 
destined champion of freedom, he conquered 
it by the forces with which itself was assailed? 
(Enthusiastic cheering.) Gentlemen, I thank 
you for the patience with which you have 
heard me — it was what I expected from the 
fair dealings of Britons ; and in what I have 
to say on the character of the Duke of Wel- 
lington, I hope I shall not utter a sentiment 
which will not find a responsive echo in every 
British heart. (Loud cheering.) My lord, it 
is difficult to say any thing original on a topic 
on which national gratitude has long since 
poured forth its encomium, and genius every 
where exhausted its eloquence, and regarding 
which, so marvellous in the glory it has to re- 
count, even the words of truth may seem to be 
gilded by the colours of panegyric. (Loud 
cheers.) Gentlemen, if I were inclined to do 
so, I have been anticipated both in prose and 
verse, and I gladly avail myself of the words 
of a noble lord, whose heart I know is with 
this meeting, and which proves that he has in- 
herited from his long line of ancestors not only 
a taste for the splendour but the real spirit of 
the days of chivalry.* (Loud cheers.) " A 
Cffisar without his ambition — a Pompey with- 
out his pride — a Marlborough without his 
avarice — a Frederick without his infidelity, he 
approaches nearer to the model of a Christian 
hero than any commander who has yet appear- 
ed among men." (Loud cheers.) Gentlemen, 
I will not speak of his exploits, I will not 
speak of Asia entranced by his valour, nor 
Europe delivered by his arm. I will recount 
his career in the lines of the poet, to which I 
am sure all present will listen with delight, if 
not from their concurrence in the sentiments, 
at least from their admiration of the language. 

" Victor on Assaye's eastern plain, 
Victor on all the fields of Spain ! 
Welcome ! thy work of glory done, 
Welcome! from dangers greatly dared, 
From nations vanquished, nations spared, 
Unconquered Wellington." 

(Loud cheers.) 

But, my lord, it is not the military glories of 
Wellington, on which I wish to dwell. They 
have become as household words amongst us, 
and will thrill the British heart in every quar- 
ter of the globe as long as a drop of British 
blood remains in the world. It is the moral 
character of the conflict which I chiefly wish 
to illustrate, and it is that which I trust will 
secure the unanimous applause of even this 
varied assembly. (Loud cheers.) He was 
assailed by numbers — he met them by skill; 
he was assailed by rapine — he encountered it 
by discipline ; he was assailed by cruelty — he 
vanquished it by humanity; he was assailed 
by the powers of wickedness — he conquered 

* Lord Eglinton. 



WELLINGTON. 



347 



them by the constancy of virtue. (Immense 
applause, mingled with cries of" No, no," from 
the Chartists.) Some of you, I perceive, deny 
the reality of these moral qualities ; but have 
you forgot the contemporaneous testimony of 
those who had received his protection, and ex- 
perienced his hostility 1 Have you forgot that 
that hero who had driven Massena at the head 
of an hundred thousand men with disgrace out 
of the war-wasted and desolate realm of Por- 
tugal, was hailed as a deliverer by millions 
whom he protected and saved, when he led his 
triumphant armies into the valleys of France 1 
(Enthusiastic cheering.) If his career was 
attended with bloodshed, it was only because 
such a calamity is inseparable from the path 
alike of the patriot-hero, as of the ravaging 
conqueror ; the slaughter of the unresisting 
never stained his triumphs ; the pillage of the 
innocent never sullied his career. — Prodigal of 
his own labour, careless of his own life, he 
was avaricious only of the blood of his soldiers ; 
he won the wealth of empires with his own 
good sword, but he retained none but what he 
received from the gratitude of the king he had 
served and the nation he had saved. (Loud 
cheers.) My lord, the glory of the conqueror 
is nothing new; other ages have been dazzled 
with the phantom of military renown; other 
nations have bent beneath the yoke of foreign 
oppression, and other ages have seen the ener- 
gies of mankind wither before the march of 
victorious power. It has been reserved for our 
age alone to witness — it has been the high pre- 
rogative of Wellington alone to exhibit — a more 
animating spectacle ; to behold power applied 
only to the purposes of beneficence ; victory 
made the means of moral renovation, conquest 
become the instrument of national resurrec- 
tion. (Cheers.) Before the march of his vic- 
torious power we have seen the energies of the 
world revive; we have heard his triumphant 
voice awaken a fallen race to noble duties, 
and recall the remembrance of their pristine 
glory; we have seen his banners waving over 
the infant armies of a renovated people, and 
the track of his chariot-wheels followed, not 
by the sighs of a captive, but the blessings of 
a liberated world. (Enthusiastic cheers, 
mingled with cries of " No, no," from the Chart- 
ists.) My lord, we may well say a liberated 
world; for it was his firmness which first op- 
posed a barrier to the hitherto irresistible 
waves of Gallic ambition; it was his counsel 
which traced out the path of European deliver- 
ance, and his victories which reanimated the 
all but extinguished spirit of European resist- 
ance. (Cheers.) My lord, it was from the 
rocks of Tores Vedras that the waves of French 
conquest first permanently receded; it was 
from Wellington's example that Russia was 
taught the means of resisting when the day of her 
trial arose ; it was from his counsels that there 
Mas traced out to the cabinet of St. Petersburgh 
the design of the Moscow campaign (cheers) ; 
and it was the contemporaneous victories of 
the Duke of Wellington that sustained the 
struggle of European freedom in that awful 
conflict. When the French legions, in apparently 
invincible strength, were preparing for the fight 
of Borodino, they were startled by the salvos 



from the Russian lines, which announced the 
victory of Salamanca. (Cheers.) And when 
the Russian army were marching in mournful 
silence round their burning capital, and the 
midnight sky was illuminated by the flames of 
Moscow, a breathless messenger brought the 
news of the fall of Madrid — (cheers) — and the 
revived multitude beheld in the triumph of 
Wellington, and the capture of the Spanish 
capital, an omen of their own deliverance and 
the rescue of their own metropolis. (Enthu- 
siastic cheers.) Nor were the services of the 
Duke of Wellington of less vital consequence 
in later times. When the tide of victory had 
ebbed on the plains of Saxony, and European 
freedom quivered in the balance, at the Con- 
gress of Prague, it was Wellington that threw 
his sword into the beam by the victory of Vit- 
toria, it was the shout of the world at the de- 
livered Peninsula which terminated the indeci- 
sion of the cabinet of Vienna. (Great ap- 
plause.) Vain would have been all the sub- 
sequent triumphs of the allies — vain the 
thunder of Leipsic and the capture of Paris, 
if Wellington had not opposed an irrepressible 
barrier to the revived power of France on the 
plains of Flanders. For what said Napoleon, 
when calmly revolving his eventful career in 
the solitude of St. Helena? "If Wellington 
and the English army had been defeated at 
Waterloo, what would have availed all the 
myriads of Russians, Austrians, Germans, and 
Spaniards, who were crowding to the Rhine, 
the Alps, and the Pyrenees?" (Enthusiastic 
cheers.) 

My lord, I have spoken now only to the 
moral effects of the military career of Welling- 
ton. I will not speak of his political career. 
A quarter of a century has elapsed since his 
warlike career terminated, and we now only 
feel its benefits. (Loud groans from the Chart- 
ists.) A quarter of a century hence, it will be 
time enough for the world to decide upon his 
civil career. (Cheers intermixed with loud 
groans from the Chartists.) Gentlemen, (turn- 
ing to the Chartists,) I well know what those 
marks of disapprobation mean — you mean we 
feel the effects of Wellington's career in the 
weight of the public debt. (Yes, yes, and loud 
cheers from the Chartists.) What ! did the 
duke create the national debt 1 Was there 
none of it in existence when he began his 
career? It was made to his hand — it was 
fixed upon us by Napoleon's powers, and in 
what state would you now have been, if, when 
you had the national debt on your backs, you 
had had the chains of France about your necks 1 
(Rapturous applause, and the whole meeting 
standing up vociferously cheering, with the ex- 
ception of the Chartists.) Gentlemen, I have 
seen what a commercial city suffers from the 
ambition of Napoleon. I have seen a city once 
greater and richer than Glasgow, when it had 
emerged from twenty years of republican con- 
quest. I saw Venice in 1815, and I saw there 
a hundred thousand artisans begging their 
bread in the streets. (Renewed and long-con- 
tinued cheering.) Gentlemen, there is not a 
hammer that now falls, nor a wheel revolves, 
nor a shuttle that is put in motion, in Glas- 
gow, that its power of doing so is not owing 



348 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



to the Duke of Wellington ; and you who now 
strive to stifle the voice of national gratitude, 
owe to him the bread of yourselves and your 
children. (Enthusiastic cheering.) And I tell 
you, whatever you may now think, so your 
own children, and your children's children 
will declare. (Immense applause.) Gentle- 
men, I have now done with any topics on 
which division of opinion can arise. I am 
now to speak on a subject, on which, I trust, we 
are all agreed, for it relates to the embellish- 
ment of Glasgow. It is proposed to refer at 
once to a committee full power to carry into 
effect the resolutions of this meeting, (cheers,) 
and I trust that before a year has elapsed, we 
shall see a noble monument, testifying our 
gratitude, erected in the heart of this great 
city. We have seen what has been lost in 
other places, by not at once coming to a deter- 
mination, in the outset, on the design. We 
have seen the subscription for Sir Walter 
Scott's monument at Edinburgh still unproduc- 
tive, though seven years have elapsed since 
the national gratitude had decreed a monument. 
Gentlemen, while Edinburgh deliberates, let 
Glasgow act (cheers) ; and let ours be the 
first monument erected to the Duke of Wel- 
lington in Scotland. (Loud cheers.) Gentle- 
men, you will hear the list of the subscriptions 
already obtained read out, and a noble monu- 
ment it already is, for the west of Scotland, 
embracing as it does splendid donations from 
the highest rank and greatest in fortune, from 
the first peer of the realm, to those princely 
merchants who are raising up a fresh aristo- 



cracy in the land. (Cheers.) But, gentlemen, 
it is not by such testimonies alone that the 
public gratitude is to be expressed; it is the 
multitude who must show "the electric shock 
of a nation's gratitude." (Cheers.) And grate- 
ful to the Duke of Wellington as will be the 
magnificent donations of the leaders of the 
land, he will be still more gratified by the 
guineas of the citizens, and the half crowns of 
the artisans. Gentlemen, I am sure that the 
gratifying result will be witnessed in this great 
city, and that the monument which will be 
reared amongst us, will remain through many 
ages a durable record of the magnificence and 
gratitude of the west of Scotland. (Loud ap- 
plause.) And there is a peculiar propriety in 
erecting in our city a statue to the Duke of 
Wellington. Glasgow already has a statue 
to her brave townsman, Sir John Moore, the 
hero who first boldly fronted the terrors of the 
Gallic legions. She has a statue to Watts, 
that matchless sage, whose genius has added 
a new power to the forces of nature, and who 
created the wealth which sustained the con- 
test with Napoleon's power. And now you 
will have a statue to Wellington, who brought 
the conquest to a triumphant conclusion; and 
has bequeathed to his country peace to create, 
and liberty to enjoy, the splendour which we be- 
hold around us. (Loud cheers.) I have the ho- 
nour to move "that a committee be now appoint- 
ed for the purpose of procuring subscriptions, 
with full power to name sub-committees, and 
take all other measures necessary for carrying 
into effect these resolutions." (Loud cheers.) 



THE AEEGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION.* 



"Ix the light of precaution," says Gibbon, 
" all conquest must be ineffectual unless it 
could be universal; for, if successful, it only 
involves the belligerent power in additional 
difficulties and a wider sphere of hostility." All 
ages have demonstrated the truth of this pro- 
found observation. The Romans conquered 
the neighbouring states of Italy and Gaul, only 
to be brought into collision with the fiercer and 
more formidable nations of Germany and Par- 
thia. Alexander overran Media and Persia, 
only to see his armies rolled back before the 
arms of the Scythians, or the innumerable le- 
gions of India, and the empire of Napoleon, 
victorious over the states of Germany and Italy, 
recoiled at length before the aroused indigna- 
tion of the Northern powers. The British em- 
pire in India, the most extraordinary work of 
conquest which modern times have exhibited, 
forms no exception to the truth of this general 
principle. The storming of Seringapatam, and 
the overthrow of the house of Tippoo, only ex- 
posed us to the incursions of the Mahratta 
horse. The subjugation of the Mahrattas in- 
volved us in a desperate and doubtful conflict 

* Blaacwood's Magazine, February, 1840. 



with the power of Holkar. His subjugation 
brought us in contact with the independent 
and brave mountaineers of Nepaul ; and even 
their conquest, and the establishment of the 
British frontier on the summit of the Hima- 
layan snows, have not given that security to 
our Eastern possessions for which its rulers 
have so long and strenuously contended; and 
beyond the stream of the Indus, beyond the 
mountains of Cashmere, it has been deemed 
necessary to establish the terror of the British 
arms, and the influence of the British name. 

That such an incursion into Central Asia 
has vastly extended the sphere both of our di- 
plomatic and hostile relations; that it has 
brought us in contact with the fierce and bar- 
barous northern tribes, and erected our out- 
posts almost within sight of the Russian vi- 
dettes, is no impeachment whatever of the wis- 
dom and expediency of the measure, if it has 
been conducted with due regard to prudence 
and the rules of art in its execution. It is the 
destiny of all conquering powers to be exposed 
to this necessity of advancing in their course. 
Napoleon constantly said, and he said with jus- 
tice, that he was not to blame for the conquests 
he undertook ; that he was forced on by invin- 



THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION. 



349 



cible necessity; that he was the head merely 
of a military republic, to whom exertion was 
existence ; and that the first pause in his ad- 
vance was the commencement of his fall. No 
one can have studied the eventful history of 
his times, without being satisfied of the jus- 
tice of these observations. The British empire 
in the east is not, indeed, like his in Europe, 
one based on injustice and supported by pil- 
lage. Protection and improvement, not spo- 
liation and misery, have followed in the rear 
of the English flag ; and the sable multitudes 
of Hindostan now permanently enjoy that pro- 
tection and security which heretofore they had 
only tasted under the transient reigns of Baber 
and Aurungzebe. But still, notwithstanding 
all its experienced benefits, the British sway 
in Hindostan is essentially that of opinion ; it 
is the working and middle classes who are 
benefitted by their sway. The interest and 
passions of too many of the rajahs and inferior 
nobility are injured by its continuance, to ren- 
der it a matter of doubt that a large and formi- 
dable body of malcontents are to be found 
within the bosom of their territories, who 
would take advantage of the first external dis- 
aster to raise again the long-forgotten standard 
of independence; and that, equally with the 
empire of Napoleon in Europe, our first move- 
ment of serious retreat would be the com- 
mencement of our fall. Nor would soldiers be 
wanting to aid the dispossessed nobles in the 
recovery of their pernicious authority. Who- 
ever raises the standard of even probable war- 
fare is sure of followers in India; the war 
castes throughout Hindostan, the Rajpoots of 
the northern provinces, are panting for the sig- 
nal of hostilities, and the moment the standard 
of native independence is raised, hundreds of 
thousands of the Mahratta horse would cluster 
around it, ardent to carry the spear and the 
torch into peaceful villages, and renew the glo- 
rious days of pillage and conflagration. 

But it is not only within our natural fron- 
tier of the Indus and the Himalaya that the ne- 
cessity of continually advancing, if we would 
exist in safety, is felt in the British empire in 
the east. The same necessity is imposed upon 
it by its external relations with foreign powers. 
It is too powerful to be disregarded in the 
balance of Asiatic politics ; its fame has ex- 
tended far into the regions of China and Tar- 
tary; its name must be respected or despised 
on the banks of the Oxus and the shores of the 
Araxes. The vast powers which lie between 
the British and Russian frontiers cannot re- 
main neutral ; they must be influenced by the 
one or the other power. " As little," said Alex- 
ander the Great, " as the heavens can admit 
of two suns, can the earth admit of two rulers 
of the East." 

Strongly as all nations, in all ages, have 
been impressed with military success as the 
mainspring of diplomatic advances, there is no 
part of the world in which it is so essential to 
political influence as in the east. Less in- 
formed than those of Europe in regard to the 
real strength of their opponents, and far less 
prospective in their principles of policy, the 
nations of Asia are almost entirely governed 
by present success in their diplomatic con- 



duct. Remote or contingent danger produces 
little impression upon them ; present peril is 
only looked at. They never negotiate till the 
dagger is at their throat; but when it is there, 
they speedily acquiesce in whatever is exacted 
of them. Regarding the success of their oppo- 
nents as the indication of the will of destiny, 
they bow, not only with submission, but with 
cheerfulness to it. All our diplomatic advances 
in the east, accordingly, have followed in the 
train of military success ; all our failures have 
been consequent on the neglect to assert with 
due spirit the rights and dignity of the British 
empire. The celebrated Roman maxim, par- 
cere subjcctis et clebcllare supcrbos, is not there a 
principle of policy ; it is a rule of necessity 
It is the condition of existence to every power 
ful state. 

The court of Persia is, in an especial man- 
ner, subject to the influence of these external 
considerations. Weakened by long-continued 
and apparently interminable domestic feuds ; 
scarce capable of mustering round the stand- 
ards of Cyrus and Darius twenty thousand 
soldiers ; destitute alike of wealth, military or- 
ganization, or central powers, the kings of 
Tehran are yet obliged to maintain a doubtful 
existence in the midst of neighbouring and 
powerful states. The Ottoman empire has 
long from the west assailed them, and trans- 
mitted, since the era when the religion of Mo- 
hammed was in its cradle, the indelible hatred 
of the successors of Othman against the fol- 
lowers of Ali. In later times, and since the 
Cross has become triumphant over the Cres- 
cent, the Russian empire has pressed upon them 
with ceaseless ambition from the north. More 
permanently formidable than the standards of 
either Timour or Genghis Khan, her disciplined 
battalions have crossed the Caucasus, spread 
over the descending hills of Georgia, and 
brought the armies of Christ to the foot of 
Mount Ararat and the shores of the Araxes. 
Even the south has not been freed from omi- 
nous signs and heart-stirring events ; the fame 
of the British arms, the justice of the British 
rule, have spread far into the regions of Cen- 
tral Asia ; the storming of Seringapatam, the 
fall of Scindiah, the conquest of Holkar, have 
resounded among the mountains of Aflghanis- 
taun, and awakened in the breasts of the Per- 
sians the pleasing hope, that from those dis- 
tant regions the arms of the avenger are des- 
tined to come; and that, amidst the conten- 
tions of England and Russia, Persia may again 
emerge to her ancient supremacy among the 
nations of the earth. 

The existence of Persia is so obviously 
threatened by the aggressions of Russia, the 
peril in that quarter is so instant and apparent, 
that the Persian government have never failed 
to take advantage of every successive impulse 
communicated to British influence, by their 
victories in Hindostan, to cement their alliance 
and draw closer their relation with this coun- 
try. The storming of Seringapatam was im 
mediately followed by a defensive treaty be- 
tween Persia and Great Britain, in 1800, by 
which it was stipulated, that the English mer- 
chant should be placed on the footing of the 
most favoured nation, and that no hostile 
2G 



350 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



European force should be permitted to pass 
through the Persian territories towards Hin- 
dostan. Every successive addition made to 
our Indian empire; every triumph of our In- 
dian arms, drew closer the relations between 
Great Britain and the court of Tehran ; and it 
was not till the wretched days of economy and 
retrenchment began, till the honour of Eng- 
land was forgotten in the subservience to popu- 
lar clamour, and her ultimate interests over- 
looked in the thirst for immediate popularity, 
that any decay in our influence with the court 
of Persia was perceptible. In those disas- 
trous days, however, when the strong founda- 
tions of the British empire were loosened, in 
obedience to the loud democratic clamour for 
retrenchment, the advantages we had gained 
in Central Asia were entirely thrown away. 
With an infatuation which now appears al- 
most incredible, but which was then lauded by 
the whole Liberal party as the very height of 
economic wisdom, we destroyed our navy at 
Bombay, thereby surrendering the Red Sea 
and the Persian Gulf to any hostile power that 
chose to occupy them ; we reduced our Indian 
army from two hundred and eighty, to one 
hundred and sixty thousand men, thereby ex- 
posing ourselves to the contempt of the native 
powers, by whom respect is never paid but to 
strength, and weakening the attachment of the 
native population, who found themselves in 
great part shut out from the dazzling career of 
British conquest; and we suffered Persia to 
combat, single-handed, the dreadful power of 
Russia in 1827, and never sent either a guinea 
or a bayonet to save the barrier of Hindostan 
from Muscovite dismemberment. These dis- 
graceful deeds took place during the halcyon 
days of Liberal administration ; when the 
Tories nominally held the reins, but the Whigs 
really possessed the power of government ; 
when that infallible criterion of right and 
wrong, popular opinion, was implicitly obey- 
ed ; when the democratic cry for retrenchment 
pervaded, penetrated, and paralyzed every de- 
partment of the state ; and when, amidst the 
mutual and loud compliments of the ministe- 
rial and opposition benches, the foundations 
of the British empire were loosened, and the 
strength of the British arms withered in the 
hands of conceding administrations. The 
consequences might easily have been fore- 
seen ; province after province was reft by the 
Muscovite invaders from the Persian empire; 
fortress after fortress yielded to the terrible 
powers of their artillery ; the torrent of the 
Araxes was bestrode by their battalions ; the 
bastions of Erivan yielded to their cannon ; 
and Persia avoided total conquest only by 
yielding up its whole northern barrier and 
most warlike provinces to the power of Rus- 
sia. It is immaterial to us whether these con- 
sequences took place under the nominal rule of 
Lord Liverpool, Mr. Canning, or the Duke of 
Wellington ; suffice it to say, that they all took 
place during the government of the masses ; 
and that the principles on which they were 
founded were those which had been advocated 
for half a century by the whole Whig party, 
And which were then, as they still are, praised 



and lauded to the skies by the whole Liberal 
leaders of every denomination. 

The consequences of this total dereliction 
of national character and interests, in order to 
gratify the short-sighted passions of an illibe- 
ral democracy, rapidly developed themselves. 
Russia, encouraged by the success with which 
she had broken the barrier of Hindostan in 
Central Asia, continued her aggressions on 
the Ottoman power in Europe. The Turkish 
fleet was destroyed by the assistance of a Bri- 
tish force at Navarino ; the Russian arms were 
carried across the Balkan by British suffer- 
ance to Adrianople ; and the Ottoman empire, 
trembling for its existence, was glad to sub- 
scribe a treaty which virtually surrendered the 
Danube and its whole northern defences to the 
Russian power. Not content with this, the 
rulers of England, during the halcyon days of 
the Reform mania, descended to still lower de- 
gradation and unparalleled acts of infatuation. 
When the Pasha of Egypt revolted against 
the Ottoman power, which seemed thus alike 
deserted by its allies and crushed by its ene- 
mies, and the disastrous battle of Koniah 
threatened to bring the Egyptian legions to the 
shores of Scutari, we turned a deaf ear to the 
earnest prayer of the distressed sultan for aid. 
Engrossed in striving to conquer Antwerp in 
northern, and Lisbon in southern Europe, for 
the advantage of revolutionary France, we 
had not a guinea nor a gun to spare to pre- 
serve the interests, or uphold the honour of 
England in the Dardanelles, and we threw 
Turkey, as the price of existence, into the 
arms of Russia. The rest is well known. The 
Muscovite battalions gave the requisite aid ; 
the domes of Constantinople reflected the 
lights of their bivouacs on the mountain of the 
giant; the arms of Ibrahim recoiled before 
this new and unexpected antagonist, and the 
treaty of Unkiar Skelessi delivered Turkey, 
bound hand and foot, into the hands of Russia, 
rendered the Euxine a Muscovite lake, and for 
ever shut out the British flag from the naviga- 
tion of its waters, or the defence of the Turk- 
ish metropolis. 

The natural results of this timorous and va- 
cillating policy, coupled with the well-known 
and fearful reduction of our naval and military 
force in India, were not slow in developing 
themselves. It soon appeared that the British 
name had ceased to be regarded with any re- 
spect in the east; and that all the influence 
derived from our victories and diplomacy in 
Central Asia had been lost. It is needless to 
go into details, the results of which are well 
known to the public, though the diplomatic 
secrets connected with them have not yet been 
revealed. Suffice it to say, that Persia, which 
for a quarter of a century had been the firm 
ally, and in fact the advanced post of the Bri- 
tish power in India, deserted by us, and sub- 
dued by Russia, was constrained to throw her- 
self into the arms of the latter. The Persian 
army was speedily organized on a better and 
more effective footing, under direction of Rus- 
sian officers ; and several thousand Russian 
troops, disguised under the name of deserters, 
were incorporated with, and gave consistency 



THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION. 



351 



to, the Persian army. The British officers, 
who had hitherto had the direction of that 
force, were obliged to retire ; insult, the inva- 
riable precursor in the east of injury, was 
heaped upon the British subjects ; redress was 
demanded in vain by the British ambassador; 
and Sir John M'Neill himself was at length 
obliged to leave the court of Tehran, from the 
numerous crosses and vexations to which he 
was exposed. Having thus got quit of the 
shadow even of British influence throughout 
the whole of Persia, the Russians were not 
long following out the now smoothed high- 
way towards Hindostan : the siege of Herat, 
the head of the defile which leads to the Indus, 
was undertaken by the Persian troops, under 
Russian guidance; and Russian emissaries 
and diplomacy, ever preceding their arms, had 
already crossed the Himalaya snows, and were 
stirring up the seeds of subdued but unex- 
tinguished hostility in the Birman empire, 
among the Nepaulese mountaineers, and the 
discontented rajahs of Hindostan. 

There is but one road by which any hostile 
army ever has, or ever can, approach India from 
the northward. Alexander the Great, Timour, 
Gengis Khan, Nadir-Shah, have all penetrated 
Hindostan by the same route. That road has, for 
three thousand years, been the beaten and well- 
known track by which the mercantile commu- 
nication has been kept up between the plains of 
the Ganges and the steppes of Upper Asia. He- 
rat stands at the head of this defile. Its popula- 
tion, which amounts to one hundred thousand 
souls, and wealth which renders it by far the 
most important city in the heart of Asia, have 
been entirely formed by the caravan trade,which, 
from time immemorial, has passed through its 
walls, going and returning from Persia to 
Hindostan. When Napoleon, in conjunction 
with the Emperor Paul, projected the invasion 
of our Indian possessions by a joint army of 
French infantry and Russian Cossacks, the 
route marked out was Astrakan, Astrabad, He- 
rat, Candahar, the Bolan pass, and the Indus, 
to Delhi. There never can be any other road 
overland to India, but that or the one from Ca- 
bool, through the Kybor pass to the Indus, 
for, to the eastward of it, inaccessible snowy 
ranges of mountains preclude the possibility 
of an army getting through ; while to the west, 
parched and impassable deserts afford obsta- 
cles still more formidable, which the returning 
soldiers of Alexander overcame only with the 
loss of half their numbers. It is quite clear, 
therefore, that Herat is the vital point of com- 
munication between Russia and Hindostan ; 
and that whoever is in possession of it, either 
actually or by the intervention of a subsidiary 
or allied force, need never disquiet himself 
about apprehensions that an enemy will pene- 
trate through the long and difficult defiles 
which lead in its rear to Hindostan. 

Since our empire in India had waxed so 
powerful as to attract the envy of the Asiatic 
tramontane nations, it became, therefore, a 
matter of necessity to maintain our influence 
among the nations who held the keys of this 
pass. Aflghanistaun was to India what Pied- 
mont has long been to Italy ; even a second 
Hannibal or Napoleon might be stopped in its 



long mountain passes and interminable barren 
hills. If, indeed, the politics of India could be 
confined only to its native powers, it might be 
wise to consider the Indus and the Himalaya 
as our frontier, and to disregard entirely the 
distant hostility or complicated diplomacy of 
the northern Asiatic states. But as long as 
India, like Italy, possesses the fatal gift of beau- 
ty ; as long as its harvests are coveted by 
northern sterility, and its riches by barbarian 
poverty; so long must the ruler of the land 
preserve with jealous care the entrance into 
its bosom, and sit with frowning majesty at 
the entrance of the pass by which " the blue- 
eyed myriads of the Baltic coast" may find ? 
way into its fabled plains. 

There was a time when British influence 
might with ease, and at little cost, have been 
established in the Aflghanistaun passes. Dost 
Mohammed was a usurper, and his legal claims 
to the throne could not bear a comparison with 
those of Shah Shoojah. But he was a usurper 
who had conciliated and won the affections of 
the people, and his vigour and success had 
given a degree of prosperity to Aflghanistaun 
which it had not for centuries experienced. 
Kamram, the sultan of Herat, was connected 
with him by blood and allied by inclination, 
and both were animated by hereditary and in- 
veterate hatred of the Persian power. They 
would willingly, therefore, have united them- 
selves with Great Britain to secure a barrier 
against northern invasion ; and such an al- 
liance would have been founded on the only 
durable bond of connection among nations — 
mutual advantage, and the sense of a formi- 
dable impending common danger. The states 
of Candahar and Cabool were in the front of 
the danger; the Russian and Persian arms 
could never have approached the Indus until 
they were subdued ; and consequently their 
adhesion to our cause, if we would only give 
them effectual support, might be relied upon 
as certain. It is well known that Dost Mo- 
hammed might have been firmly attached to 
the British alliance within these few years by the 
expenditure of a hundred or even fifty thousand 
pounds, and the aid of a few British officers to 
organize his forces. And when it is recol- 
lected that the Sultan of Herat, alone and un- 
aided by us, held out against the whole power 
of Persia, directed by Russian officers, for one 
year and nine months, it is evident both with 
what a strong spirit of resistance to northern 
aggression the Aflghanistaun states are ani- 
mated, and what elements of resistance they 
possess among themselves, even when un- 
aided, against northern ambition. 

The immense advantage of gaining the sup- 
port of the tribes inhabiting the valley of 
Affghan, thus holding in their hands the keys 
of Hindostan, was forgone by the British 
power in India, partly from the dilapidated 
state to which the army had been reduced by 
the miserable retrenchment forced upon the 
government by the democratic cry for econo- 
my at home, and partly from the dread of in- 
volving ourselves in hostility with Runjeet Sing, 
the formidable chief of Lahore, whose hostility 
to the Affghanistauns was hereditary and in- 
veterate. There can be little doubt that tbf 



352 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



conclusion of a treaty, offensive and defensive, 
with the powers of Cabool, would have ex- 
cited great discontent, if not provoked open 
hostility, at the court of Lahore. In relinquish- 
ing their hold of the Affghanistaun states, from 
the dread of compromising their relations with 
the wily potentate of the Indus, the British 
government in India were only acting upon 
that system of temporizing, conceding, and 
shunning present danger, which has charac- 
terized all their public acts ever since the in- 
fluence of the urban masses became predomi- 
nant in the British councils. But it is now 
apparent, that in breaking with the Affghans 
to conciliate the rajah, the British incurred the 
greater ultimate, to avoid the present lesser 
danger. Runjeet Sing, indeed, was a formi- 
dable power, with seventy thousand men, and 
one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon under 
his command. But his situation, between the 
British territory on the one side, and the Aff- 
ghans on the other, rendered him incapable of 
making any effectual resistance. His military 
force was by no means equal to what had been 
wielded by Tippoo or the Mahrattas, and his 
rear was exposed to the incursions of his he- 
reditary and inveterate enemies in the Affghan- 
istaun mountains. Still, more than all, his 
territories were pierced by the great and navi- 
gable river of the Indus — the best possible 
base for British operations, capable of con- 
veying both the muniments of war and the 
provisions for an army into the heart of his 
dominions. In these circumstances, it is evi- 
dent that the submission of Runjeet Sing must 
soon have become a matter of necessity ; or, 
at all events, even if we had been compelled 
to commence hostilities with him, it would 
have been a far less formidable contest than 
that into which we have been driven, by aban- 
doning the Affghans in the late expedition to 
Cabool. The one would have been what the 
subjugation and conquest of Prussia was to 
Napoleon, the other was an expedition fraught 
with all the cost and perils of the advance to 
Moscow. 

Notwithstanding these perils and this cost, 
however, we have no doubt that, at the time it 
was undertaken, the expedition to Affghan- 
istaun had become a matter of necessity. We 
had been reduced to such a pass by the eco- 
nomy, concession, and pusillanimity of former 
governments, that we had no alternative but 
either to see the whole of Central Asia and 
Northern Hindostan arrayed in one formidable 
league, under Russian guidance, against us, or 
to make a desperate and hazardous attempt to 
regain our lost character. We have preferred 
the latter alternative; and the expedition of 
Lord Auckland, boldly conceived and vigorous- 
ly executed, has hitherto, at least, been crowned 
with the most signal success. That it was 
also attended with great and imminent hazard 
is equally certain ; but the existence of that 
peril, imposed upon us by the short-sighted 
parsimonious spirit of the mercantile demo- 
cratic communities which for fifteen years 
past have swayed the British empire, is no 
impeachment whatever, either of the wisdom 
or necessity of the adventurous step which 
,ras at last resolved on. It only shows the 



straits to which a great nation must speedily 
be reduced when its government, in an evil 
hour, yields to the insidious cry for democra- 
tic retrenchment. 

Already the beneficial effects of this bold 
policy have become apparent. The crossing 
of the Indus by a powerful British army; the 
surmounting of the hills of Cashmere; the 
passage of the Bolan defile ; the storming of 
Ghuznee ; the fall of Candahar and Cabool, 
and the restoration of Shah Shoojah to the 
throne of his ancestors; have resounded 
through the whole of Asia, and restored, after 
its eclipse of fifteen years, the honour of the 
British name. The doubtful fidelity of the 
Rajah of Lahore has been overawed into sub- 
mission ; the undisguised hostility of the court 
of Persia has terminated, and friendly rela- 
tions are on the eve of being re-established ; 
and the indecision of the Sultan of Herat and 
his brave followers has been decided by the 
terror of the British arms, and the arrival of 
a train of artillery within its ruined bastions. 
As Britons, we rejoice from the bottom of our 
hearts at these glorious successes; and we 
care not who were the ministry at the head of 
affairs when they were achieved. They were 
undertaken in a truly British spirit— executed 
by whom they may, they emanated from con- 
servative principles. As much as the ruinous 
reductions and parsimonious spirit of Lord 
William Bentinck's administration bespoke 
the poisonous influence of democratic re- 
trenchment in the great council of the empire, 
so much does the expedition to Affghanistaun 
bespeak the felicitous revival of the true English 
spirit in the same assembly. At both periods 
it is easy to see, that, though not nominally 
possessed of the reins of power, her majesty's 
opposition really ruled the state. In the Aff- 
ghanistaun expedition there was very little of 
the economy which cut in twain the Indian 
army, but very much of the spirit which ani- 
mated the British troops at Assaye and Las- 
warree ;— there was very little of the truckling 
which brought the Russians to Constantinople, 
but a great deal of the energy which carried 
the English to Paris. 

In a military point of view, the expedition 
to Affghanistaun is one of the most memorable 
events of modern times. For the first time since 
the days of Alexander the Great, a civilized army 
has penetrated the mighty barrier of deserts 
and mountains which separates Persia from 
Hindostan ; and the prodigy has been exhi- 
bited to an astonished world, of a remote is- 
land in the European seas pushing forward its 
mighty arms into the heart of Asia, and carry- 
ing its victorious standards into the strongholds 
of Mohammedan faith and the cradle of the 
Mogul empire. Neither the intricate streams 
of the Punjab, nor the rapid flow of the Indus, 
nor the waterless mountains of Affghanistaun, 
nor the far-famed bastions of Ghuznee, have 
been able to arrest our course. For the first 
time in the history of the world, the tide of 
conquest has flowed up from Hindostan into 

Central Asia ; the European race has asserted 
its wonted superiority over the Asiatic; re- 
versing the march of Timour and Alexander, 
the sable battalions of the Ganges have ap- 



THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION. 



353 



peared as conquerors on the frontiers of Persia, 
and on the confines of the steppes cf Samar- 
cand. So marvellous and unprecedented an 
event is indeed fitted to awaken the contempla- 
tion of every thoughtful mind. It speaks vo- 
lumes as to the mighty step made by the human 
race in the last five hundred years, and indi- 
cates the vast agency and unbounded effects 
of that free spirit, of which Britain is the cen- 
tre, which has thus, for a season at least, in- 
verted the heretofore order of nature, made 
the natives of Hindostan appear as victors in 
the country of Gengis Khan, and brought the 
standards of civilized Europe, though in the 
inverse order, into the footsteps of the phalanx 
of Alexander. 

Though such, however, have been the mar- 
vels of the British expedition to Central Asia, 
yet it is not to be disguised that it was attend- 
ed by at least equal perils ; and never, per- 
haps, since the British standard appeared on 
the plains of Hindostan, was their empire in 
such danger as during the dependence of this 
glorious but hazardous expedition. It was, 
literally speaking, to our Indian empire what 
the expedition to Moscow was to the European 
dominion of Napoleon. Hitherto, indeed, the 
result has been different, and we devoutly hope 
that, m that respect, the dissimilarity will con- 
tinue. But in both cases the danger was the 
same. It was the moving forward a large 
force so far from its resources and the base 
of its operations, which in both cases consti- 
tuted the danger. If any serious check had 
been sustained by our troops in that distant 
enterprise ; if Runjeet Sing had proved openly 
treacherous, and assailed our rear and cut off 
our supplies when the bulk of our force was 
far advanced in the Affghanistaun defiles; if 
the Bolan pass had been defended with a cou- 
rage equal to its physical strength ; if the 
powder-bags which blew open the gates of 
Ghuznee had missed fire, or the courage of 
those who bore them had quailed under the 
extraordinary perils of their mission ; the fate 
of the expedition would in all probability have 
been changed, and a disaster as great as the 
cutting off of Crassus and his legions in Meso- 
potamia, would have resounded like a clap of 
thunder through the whole of Asia. Few if 
any of the brave men who had penetrated into 
Affghanistaun would ever have returned; the 
Burmese, the Nepaulese would immediately 
have appeared in arms ; the Mahratta and 
Pindaree horse would have re-assembled round 
their predatory standards; and, while the Bri- 
tish empire in Hindostan rocked to its foun- 
dation, an Affghanistaun army, directed by 
Russian officers, and swelled by the predatory 
tribes of Central Asia, would have poured 
down, thirsting for plunder and panting for 
blood,* on the devoted plains of Hindostan. 

Subsequent events have already revealed, 
in the clearest manner, the imminent danger 
in which the English empire in the East was 
placed at the period of the Affghanistaun ex- 
pedition. So low had the reputation of the 



* How completely have the subsequent disasters of 
Affghanistaun and Hie massacre of ihe Coord Cauul Pass 
proved the trulh of those presentiments ! 
45 



British name sunk in the east, that even the 
Chinese, the most unwarlike and least preci- 
pitate of the Asiatic empires, had ventured to 
offer a signal injury to the British interests, 
and insult to the British name; and so mise- 
rably deficient were government in any pre- 
vious preparation for the danger, that it was 
only twelve months after the insult was of- 
fered, that ships of war could be fitted out in 
the British harbours to attempt to seek for re- 
dress. It is now ascertained that a vast con- 
spiracy had been long on foot in the Indian 
peninsula to overturn our power; in the 
strongholds of some of the lesser rajahs in the 
southern part of the peninsula, enormous mi- 
litary stores have been found accumulated ; 
and not a doubt can remain, that, if any seri- 
ous disaster had happened to our army in 
Central Asia, not only would the Burmese 
and Nepaulese have instantly commenced hos- 
tilities, but a formidable insurrection would 
have broken out among the semi-independent 
rajahs, in the very vitals of our power. And 
yet it was while resting on the smouldering 
fires of such a volcano, that Lord William 
Bentinck and the Liberal Administration of 
India thought fit to reduce our military force 
to one-half, and shake the fidelity of the native 
troops by the reduction in many important 
particulars of their pay and allowances. 

But this proved hostility of so large a por- 
tion of the native powers, suggests matter for 
further and most serious consideration. It is 
clear, that although the British government 
has, to an immense degree, benefited India, 
yet it has done so chiefly by the preservation 
of peace, and the suppression of robbery, 
throughout its vast dominions; and it is pain- 
fully evident, that hardly any steps have yet 
been taken to reconcile the natives to our do- 
minion, by the extended market which we 
have opened to their industry. The startling 
fact which Mr. Montgomery Martin* has 
clearly established, that notwithstanding all 
that was prophesied of, the trade to India has 
been, including exports and imports, less for 
the List Itcatly years than for the. twenty years pre- 
ret/ins;, clearly demonstrates some vital defect 
in our colonial policy. Nor is it difficult to 
see where that error is to be found. We have 
loaded the produce of India — sugar, indigo, 
&c. — with duties of nearly a hundred per cent., 
while we have deluged them with our own 
manufactures at an import duty of two or three 
per cent. In our anxiety to find a vent for our 
own manufactures on the continent of Hin- 
dostan, we seem to have entirely forgotten 
that there was another requisite indispensably 
necessary towards the success of our projects 
even for our own interests, — to give them the 
means of paying for them. Our conduct to- 
wards our colonies, equally with that to foreign 
states, has exhibited reciprocity all on one side 
— with this material difference, that we have, 
in our blind anxiety to conciliate foreign 
slates, allowed the whole benefits of the rec> 



* See Colonial Magazine, No. I., article— " Foreign 
Trade to India,"— a newly established miscellany, full 
of valuable information, and which, if conducted on 
ri^'ht principles, will prove of the very highest import- 
ance. 

2g2 



354 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



procity treaties to rest with them ; while, in 
our selfish legislation towards our colonial 
subjects, we have taken the whole to our- 
selves. 

So vast is the importance of our Indian pos- 
sessions to the British empire, and so bound- 
less the market for her manufactures which 
might be opened if a truly wise and liberal 
policy were pursued towards our Indian pos- 
sessions, that there is nothing more to be re- 
gretted than that there has not hitherto issued 
from the press a popular and readable history 
of our Indian possessions. Auber has, indeed, 
with great industry, narrated the leading facts, 
and supported them by a variety of interesting 
official documents. But it is in vain to con- 
ceal, that his book possesses no attractions to 
the general reader ; and accordingly, although 
it will always be a standard book of reference 
to persons studying Indian affairs, it has not 
and will not produce any impression upon 
public thought. It was, therefore, with pecu- 
liar pleasure that we recently opened the 
Chapters on Indian History, just published by 
Mr. Thornton, already so favourably known 
to the eastern world by his work on India, and 
its State and Prospects. From the cursory ex- 
amination we have been able to give to this 
very interesting work, we have only reason to 
regret that the author has not been more com- 
prehensive in his plan, and that, instead of 
chapters on British India since the adminis- 
tration of Marquis Wellesley, in one volume, 
he has not given to the world a full history 
of the period in three. The work is distin- 
guished by judgment, candour, and research, 
and is, beyond all doubt, the most valuable 
that has yet appeared on the recent history of 
India. We would beg leave only to suggest 
to the able author, that his next edition should 
extend to two volumes, and should embrace 
the whole events of the period of which he 
treats ; in particular, that Lord Hastings' war 
in 1817 should be more fully enlarged upon ; 
and that greater exertions should be made, by 
the introduction of picturesque incidents and 
vivid descriptions, to interest the mass of the 
nation in a subject daily rising in importance, 
and on which they must soon be called upon 
to exercise the functions of direct legislation. 

To have engaged in and successfully ac- 
complished such an undertaking ; to have 
overcome so many and such formidable inter- 
vening obstacles, and planted the British guns 
in triumph on the walls of Herat, is one of the 
most glorious exploits which have ever graced 
the long annals of British military prowess. 
That our soldiers were undaunted in battle 
and irresistible in the breach has been often 
proved, in the fields alike of Asiatic and Euro- 
pean fame. But here they have exhibited 
qualities of a totally different kind, and in 
which hitherto they were not supposed to 
have been equal to the troops of other states. 
They have successfully accomplished marches, 
unparalleled in modern times for their length 
and hardship ; surmounted mountain ranges, 
compared to which the passage of the St. 
Bernard by Napoleon must sink into insig- 
nificance ;. an f J solved the great problem, so 
mucn debated, and hitherto unascertained in 



military science, as to the practicability of an 
European force, with the implements and in- 
cumbrances of modern warfare, surmounting 
the desert and mountain tracts which separate 
Persia from Hindostan. Involved as we are 
in the pressing interests of domestic politics, 
and in the never-ending agitation of domestic 
concerns, the attention of the British public 
has been little attracted by this stupendous 
event; but it is one evidently calculated to fix 
the attention of the great military nations on 
the continent, and which will stand forth in 
imperishable lustre in the annals of history. 

There is one result which may and should 
follow from our undertakings in Affghanistaun, 
which, if properly improved, may render it the 
means of strengthening, in the most essential 
manner, our possessions in the east. The In- 
dus and the Himalaya are the natural frontier 
of our dominions ; they are what the Danube 
and the Rhine were to the Romans, and the 
former of these streams to Napoleon's empire. 
The Indus is navigable for twelve hundred 
miles, and for nine hundred by steamers of 
war and mercantile vessels of heavy burden. 
It descends nearly in a straight line from the 
impassable barrier of the Himalaya to the 
Indian ocean ; its stream is so rapid, and its 
surface so broad, that no hostile force can pos- 
sibly cross it in the face of a powerful defen- 
sive marine. Never was an empire which had 
such a frontier for its protection ; never was 
such abase afforded for military operations as 
on both its banks. Provisions for any num- 
ber of soldiers ; warlike stores to any amount ; 
cannon sufficient for a hundred thousand men, 
can with ease ascend its waves. Vain is the 
rapidity of its current; the power of steam 
has given to civilized man the means of over- 
coming it ; and before many years are expired, 
British vessels, from every harbour in the 
United Kingdom, may ascend that mighty 
stream, and open fresh and hitherto unheard- 
of markets for British industry in the bound- 
less regions of Central Asia. Now, then, is 
the time to secure the advantages, and gain 
the mastery of this mercantile artery and fron- 
tier stream ; and, by means of fortified stations 
on its banks, and a powerful fleet of armed 
steamers in its bosom, to gain that impregna- 
ble barrier to our Indian possessions, against 
which, if duly supported by manly vigour at 
home, and wise administration in our Indian 
provinces, all the efforts of Northern ambition 
will beat in vain. 

But there is one consideration deserving of 
especial notice which necessarily follows from 
this successful irruption. The problem of 
marching overland to India is now solved ; the 
Russian guns have come down from Peters- 
burg to Herat, and the British have come up 
from Delhi to Cabool. English cannon are 
now planted in the embrasures, against which, 
twelve months ago, the Russian shot were di- 
rected ; and if twenty thousand British could 
march from Delhi to Candahar and Cabool, 
forty t h ansa nd I Russians may march from Jlstrakan 
to the Ganges and Culcutta. Our success has 
opened the path in the East to Russian ambi- 
tion ; — the stages of our ascending army point 
out the stations for their descending host ; and 



THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION. 



355 



the ease with which our triumph has heen 
effected, will dispel any doubts which they 
may have entertained as to the practicability 
of ultimately accomplishing the long-cherish- 
ed object of their ambition, and conquering in 
Calcutta the empire of .the east. This is the 
inevitable result of our success : but it is one 
which should excite no desponding feeling in 
any British bosom ; and we allude to it, not 
with the selfish, unpatriotic design of chilling 
the national ardour at our success, but in 
order, if possible, to arouse the British people 
to a sense of the new and more extended duties 
to which they are called, and the wider sphere 
of danger and hostility in which they are in- 
volved. 

It is no longer possible to disguise that the 
sphere of hostility and diplomatic exertion has 
been immensely extended by our success in 
Affghanistaun. Hitherto the politics of India 
have formed, as it were, a world to themselves ; 
a dark range of intervening mountains or arid 
deserts were supposed to separate Hindostan 
from Central Asia; and however much we 
might be disquieted at home by the progress 
of Russian or French ambition, no serious 
fears were entertained that either would be 
able to accomplish the Quixotic exploit of 
passing the western range of the Himalaya 
mountains. Now, however, this veil has been 
rent asunder — this mountain screen has been 
penetrated. The Russian power in Persia, 
and the British in India, now stand face to 
face : the advanced posts of both have touched 
Herat ; the high-road from St. Petersburg to 
Calcutta has been laid open by British hands. 
The advanced position we have gained must 
now be maintained ; if we retire, even from 
tributary or allied states, the charm of our in- 
vincibility is gone ; the day when the god Ter- 
minus recoils before a foreign enemy, is the 
commencement of decline. We do not bring 
forward this consideration in order to blame 
the expedition; but in order to show into what 
a contest, and with what a power, it has neces- 
sarily brought us. Affghanistaun is the out- 
post of Russia; Dost Mohammed, now exiled 
from his throne, was a vassal of the Czar; and 
we must now contend for the empire of the 
east, not with the rajahs of India, but the 
Moscovite battalions. 

The reality of these anticipations as to the 
increased amount of the danger of a collision 
with Russia, which has arisen from the great 
approximation of our outposts to theirs, wh>ch 
the Affghanistaun expedition has occasioned, 
is apparent. Already Russia has taken the 
alarm, and the expedition against Khiva shows 
that she has not less the inclination, than she 
unquestionably has the power, of amply pro- 
viding for herself against what she deems the 
impending danger. No one can for a moment 
suppose that that expedition is really intended 
to chastise the rebellious Khan. Thirty thou- 
sand men, and a large train of artillery, are 
not sent against an obscure chieftain in Tar- 
tary, whom a few regiments of Cossacks 
would soon reduce to obedience. A glance at 
the map will at once show what was the real 
object in view. Khiva is situated on the Oxus, 
and the Oxus flows to the north-west from the 



mountains which take their rise from the north- 
ern boundary of Cabool. Its stream is navi- 
gable to the foot of the Affghanistaun moun- 
tains, and from the point where water commu- 
nication ceases, it is a passage of only five or 
six days to the valley of Cabool. If, therefore, 
the Russians once establish themselves at 
Cabool, they will have no difficulty in reach- 
ing the possessions of Shah Shoojah; and 
their establishment will go far to outweigh 
the influence established by the British, by the 
Affghanistaun expedition, among the Affghan- 
istaun tribes. Already, if recent accounts can 
be relied on, this effect has become apparent. 
Dost Mohammed, expelled from his kingdom, 
has found support among the Tartar tribes ; 
backed by their support, he has already re-ap- 
peared over the hills, and regained part of his 
dominions, and the British troops, on their re- 
turn to Affghanistaun, have already received 
orders to halt. Let us hope that it is not in 
our case, as it was in that of the French at 
Moscow, that when they thought the campaign 
over it was only going to commence.* 

Regarding, then, our success in Affghanis- 
taun as having accelerated by several years 
the approach of this great contest, it becomes 
the British nation well to consider what pre- 
parations they have made at home to maintain 
it. Have we equipped and manned a fleet 
capable of withstanding the formidable arma- 
ment which Nicholas has always ready for im- 
mediate operations in the Baltic 1 Have we 
five-and-twenty ships of the line and thirty 
frigates ready to meet the thirty ships of the 
line and eighteen frigates which Nicholas has 
always equipped for sea at Cronstadt? Have 
we thirty thousand men in London ready to 
meet the thirty thousand veterans whom the 
Czar has constantly prepared to step on board 
his fleet on the shores of the Baltic ? Alas ! 
we have none of these things. We could not, 
to save London from destruction or the British 
empire from conquest, fit out three ships of the 
line to protect the mouth of the Thames, or 
assemble ten thousand men to save Woolwich 
or Portsmouth from conflagration. What be- 
tween Radical economy in our army estimates, 
Whig parsimony in our naval preparations, 
and Chartist violence in our manufacturing 
cities, we have neither a naval nor a military 
force to protect ourselves from destruction. 
All that Sir Charles Adam, one of the lords 
of the admiralty, could say on this subject last 
session of parliament was, that we had three 
ships of the line and three guard-ships to protect the 
shores of England. Never was such a proof 
afforded that we had sunk down from the days 
of giants into those of pigmies, than the use 
of such an argument by a lord of the British 
admiralty. Why, thirty years age, we sent 
thirty-nine ships of the line to attack the 
enemy's naval station at Antwerp, without 
raising the blockade of one of his harbours, 
from Gibraltar to the North Cape. Herein, 
then, lies the monstrous absurdity, the unpa- 
ralleled danger of our present national policy, 
that we are vigorous even to temerity in the 



* How fatally was this sinister presentiment realized 
in consequence of incredible incapacity on the part of 
the British authorities in possession of Cabool. 



356 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



east, and parsimonious even to pusillanimity 
in the west; and that while we give Russia a 
fair pretext for hostility, and perhaps some 
ground for complaint in the centre of Asia, 
we make no preparation whatever to resist her 
hostility on the shores of England. 

The contrast between the marvellous vigour 
of our Indian government and the niggardly 
spirit with which all our establishments are 
starved down at home, would be inconceivable 
if we did not recollect by what opposite mo- 
tives our government is regulated in Hindos- 
tan and in the British islands. Taxation in 
India falls upon the inhabitants, who are unre- 
presented; taxation at home falls upon the ten- 
pounders, who have a numerical majority in 
parliament. We never doubted the inclination 
of a democracy to dip their hands in other 
people's pockets ; what we doubted was their in- 
clination, save in the last extremity, to put 
them in their own. 

Disregard of the future, devotion to present 
objects, has, in all ages, been the characteris- 
tic of the masses of mankind. We need not 
wonder that the British populace are distin- 
guished by the well-known limited vision of 
their class, when all the eloquence of Demos- 
thenes failed in inducing the most enlightened 
republic of antiquity to take any measures to 
ward off the danger arising from the ambition 
of Philip of Macedon; and all the wisdom of 
Washington was unable to communicate to 
the greatest republic of modern times, strength 
or foresight sufficient to prevent its capitol 
from being taken, and its arsenals pillaged by 
a British division not three thousand strong. 
Unless, however, the Conservative press can 
succeed in rousing the British public to a sense 
of their danger on this subject, and the Con- 
servative leaders in Parliament take up the 
matter earnestly and vigorously, it may safely 
be pronounced that the days of the British em- 
pire are numbered. 

No empire can possibly exist for any length 
of time which provokes hostility in its distant 
possessions, while it neglects preparation in 
the heart of its power; which buckles on its 
gloves and puts on the helmet, but leaves the 
breastplate and the cuirass behind. If a Rus- 
sian fleet of thirty ships of the line appears 
off the Nore, it will not be by deriding their 
prowess, or calling them a " pasteboard fleet," 
that the danger will be averted from the arse- 
nals and the treasures of England. The Rus- 
sian sailors do not possess any thing like the 
nautical skill or naval habits of the British ; 
but they are admirably trained to ball practice, 
they possess the native courage of their race, 
and will stand to their guns with any sailors in 
Europe. Remember the words of Nelson, " Lay 
yourself alongside of a Frenchman, but out- 
manoeuvre a Russian." 

The manifest and not yet terminated dan- 
gers with which the Affghanistaun expedition 
was attended, should operate as a warning, and 
they will be cheaply purchased if they prove a 
timely one, to the British people, of the enor- 
mous dangers, not merely to the national ho- 
nour and independence, but to the vital pecu- 
niary interests of every individual in the state, 
©f continuing any longer the pernicious sys- 



tem of present economy, and total disregard 
of future danger, which for twenty years has 
characterized every department of our gov- 
ernment. Why is it that England has now 
been compelled in the east, for the first time, 
to incur the enormous perils of the Affghan- 
istaun expedition — to hazard, as it were, the 
very existence of our eastern empire upon a 
single throw ; and adventure a large propor- 
tion of the British army, and the magic charm 
of British invincibility, upon a perilous ad- 
vance, far beyond the utmost frontiers of Hin- 
dostan, into the heart of Asia 1 Simply be- 
cause previous preparation had been abandon- 
ed, ultimate danger disregarded; because re- 
trenchment was the order of the day, and go- 
vernment yielded to the ever popular cry of 
present economy ; because the noble naval and 
military establishment of former times was 
reduced one-half, or allowed to expire, in the 
childish belief that it never again would be re- 
quired. Rely upon it, a similar conduct will 
one day produce a similar necessity to the 
British empire. It will be found, and that too 
ere many years have passed over, that the 
Duke of Wellington was right when he said, 
that a great empire cannot with safety wage a 
little war; and that nothing but present dan- 
ger and future disaster can result from a sys- 
tem which blindly shuts its eyes to the future, 
and never looks beyond the conciliating the 
masses by a show of economy at the moment. 
An Affghanistaun expedition — a Moscow cam- 
paign — will be necessary to ward off impend- 
ing danger, or restore the sunk credit of the 
British name : happy if the contest can thus be 
averted from our own shores, and by incur- 
ring distant dangers we can escape domestic 
subjugation. 

But let not foreign nations imagine, from all 
that has been said or may be said by the Con- 
servatives on this vital subject, that Great Bri- 
tain has now lost her means of defence, or 
that, if a serious insult or injury is offered to 
her, she may not soon be brought into a condi- 
tion to take a fearful vengeance upon her ene- 
mies. The same page of history which tells 
us that while democratic states never can be 
brought to foresee remote dangers, or incur 
present burdens to guard against it; yet when 
the danger is present, and strikes the senses of 
the multitude, they are capable of the most 
stupendous exertions. That England, in the 
event of a war breaking out in her present 
supine, unprepared state, would sustain in the 
outset very great disasters, is clear; but it is 
not by any ordinary calamities that a power of 
such slow growth and present magnitude as 
England is to be subdued. She now possesses 
2,800,000 tonnage, numbers an hundred and 
sixty thousand seamen in her commercial na- 
vy, and a fleet of seven hundred steam-boats, 
more than all Europe possesses, daily prowl 
along her shores. Here are all the elements 
of a powerful marine; at no period could 
Great Britain command such a foundation for 
naval strength within her bosom. What is 
wanting, is not the elements of an irresistible 
naval force, but the sagacity in the people to 
foresee the approaching necessity for its es- 
tablishment, and the virtue in the government 



THE FUTURE. 



357 



to propose the burdens indispensable for its re- 
storation. In the experienced difficulty of 
either communicating this foresight to the one, 
or imparting this virtue to the other, may be 
traced the well-known and often-predicted ef- 
fects of democratic ascendency. But that 
same ascendency, if the spirit of the people is 
roused by experienced disgrace, or their inte- 
rests affected by present calamity, would infal- 
libly make the most incredible exertions; and 
a navy, greater than any which ever yet issued 
from the British harbours, might sally forth 
from our sea-girt isle, to carry, like the French 



Revolutionary armies, devastation and ruin 
into all the naval establishments of Europe. 
No such career of naval conquest, however, is 
either needed for the glory, or suited for the in- 
terests of England ; and it is as much from a 
desire to avert that ultimate forcible and most 
painful conversion of all the national energies 
to warlike objects, as to prevent the immediate 
calamities which it would occasion, that we 
earnestly press upon the country the immediate 
adoption, at any cost, of that great increase to 
our naval and military establishments which 
can alone avert one or both of these calamities. 



THE FUTURE.* 



That human affairs are now undergoing a 
great and durable alteration; that we are in a 
transition state of society, when new settlements 
are taking place, and the old levels are heaved 
up, or displaced by expansive force from be- 
neath, is universally admitted ; but the world 
is as yet in the dark as to the ultimate results, 
whether for good or evil, of these vast and or- 
ganic changes. While the popular advocates 
look upon them as the commencement of a new 
era in social existence — as the opening of a 
period of knowledge, freedom, and general 
happiness, in which the human race, freed 
from the fetters of feudal tyranny, is to arrive 
at an unprecedented state of social felicity — 
the Conservative party everywhere regard 
them as fraught with the worst possible effects 
to all classes in society, and to none more im- 
mediately than those by whom they are so 
blindly urged forward — as conducing to the 
destruction of all the bulwarks both of property 
and freedom. While these opposite and irre- 
concilable opinions are honestly and firmly 
maintained by millions on either side of this 
great controversy, and victory inclines some- 
times to one side and sometimes to another in 
the course of the contests, civil and military, 
•which it engenders, " Time rolls on his cease- 
less course;" the actors and the spectators in 
the world's debate are alike hurried to the gray*, 
and new generations succeed, who are borne 
along by the same mighty stream, and inherit 
from their parents the passions and prejudices 
inseparable from a question in which such 
boundless expectations have been excited on 
the one side, and such vital interests are at 
stake on the other. 

The symptoms of this transition state dis- 
tinctly appear, not merely in the increase of 
political power on the part of the lower classes 
in almost every state of western Europe, but 
the general formation of warm hopes and an- 
ticipations on their parts inconsistent with 
their present condition, and the universal adap- 
tation of science, literature, arts, and manufac- 
tures to their wants. Supposing the most 

♦ Tocqueviiip. Democracy in America, 2 vol?. Paris. 
1835, &. London, 1«35. Blackvvood"s Magazine, Jan. 1836. 



decided re-action to take place in public feel- 
ing in the British dominions, and the most 
Conservative administration to be placed at 
the helm, still the state is essentially revolu- 
tionized. The great organic change has been 
made, and cannot be undone. Government is 
no longer, and never again will be, as long as 
a mixed constitution lasts, a free agent. It is 
impelled by the inclinations of the majority of 
nine hundred thousand electors, in whom su- 
preme power is substantially vested. At one 
time it may be too revolutionary, at another 
too monarchical/but in either it can only be 
the reflecting mirror of public opinion, and 
must receive, not communicate, the impulse 
of general thought. France is irrecoverably 
and thoroughly revolutionized. All the checks, 
either on arbitrary or popular power, have been 
completely destroyed by the insane ambition of 
its populace; and its capital has been trans- 
formed into a vast arena, where two savage 
wild beasts, equally fatal to mankind — despo- 
tic power and democratic ambition — fiercely 
contend for the mastery, but where the fair 
form of freedom is never again destined to ap- 
pear. Spain and Portugal are torn by the 
same furious passions — a Vendean struggle is 
maintained with heroic constancy in the north 
— a Jacobin revolution is rapidly spreading in 
the south; and amidst a deadly civil war, and 
the confiscation of church and funded property, 
the democratic and despotic principles are 
rapidly coming into collision, and threaten 
speedily there, as elsewhere, to extinguish all 
the securities of real freedom in the shock. 

It is not merely, however, in the political 
world that the symptoms of a vast organic 
change in western Europe are to be dis- 
cerned. Manners and habits evince as clearly 
the prodigious, and, as we fear, degrading tran- 
sition, which is going on amongst us. We are 
not blindly attached to the customs of former 
times, and willingly admit, that, in some re- 
spects, a change for the better has taken place; 
but in others how wofully for the worse ; and 
how prodigious, at all events, is the alteration, 
whether for better or worse, which is in pro- 
gress! With the feeling of chivalry still giv- 



358 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



ing dignity to the higher ranks, and a sense of 
loyalty yet elevating the lower ; with religion 
paramount in all the influential classes, and 
subordination as yet unshaken among the in- 
dustrious poor, a state of manners ensued, a 
degree of felicity was attained, a height of na- 
tional glory was reached, to which the future 
generations of Europe will look back with the 
more regret, that, once lost, it is altogether ir- 
revocable. We do not despair of the fortunes 
of our country, still less of the human race ; 
but we have no hope that those bright and 
glorious days can ever return. Vigour, in- 
deed, is not awanting; activity, restless, in- 
satiable activity, is in profusion ; talent is as 
yet undecayed ; but where are the elevated 
feelings, the high resolves, the enduring con- 
stancy, the religious inspiration, the moral 
resolution, the disinterested loyalty, the un- 
shaken patriotism, which gave dignity and 
grandeur to the past age ? These qualities, 
doubtless, are still found in many individuals; 
but we speak of the general tendency of things, 
not the character of particular men. Even 
where they do occur, are they not chiefly to be 
discerned in those of a certain standing in life ; 
and are they not remarked by the rising ge- 
neration as remnants of the former age, who 
are fast disappearing, and will soon be totally 
extinct? 

Look at education, — above all, the education 
of the middle and working classes, — and say 
whether a vast and degrading change is not 
there rapidly taking place? It is there more 
Jian anywhere else that " coming events cast 
;heir shadows before." Elevating or ennobling 
knowledge; moral and religious instruction; 
purifying and entrancing compositions are 
discarded ; the arts, the mechanical or manu- 
facturing arts, alone are looked to. Nothing 
is thought of but what can immediately be 
turned into money. The church, and all the 
institutions connected with it, are considered 
as not destined to any lengthened endurance, 
and, therefore, classical learning is scouted 
and abandoned. The philosopher's stone is 
alone sought after by the alchymists of mo- 
dern days; nothing is studied but what will 
render the human mind prolific of dollars. 
To purify the heart, and humanize the affec- 
tions ; to elevate the understanding and dig- 
nify the manners; to provide not the means 
of eievation in life, but the power of bearing 
elevation with propriety; to confer not the 
power of subduing others, but the means of 
conquering one's self; to impress love to God 
and good-will towards men, are deemed the 
useless and antiquated pursuits of the monks 
of former days. Practical chemistry and sul- 
phuric acid; decrepitating salts and hydraulic 
engines; algebraic equations and commercial 
academies; mercantile navigation and double 
and single book-keeping, have fairly, in the 
seminaries of the middle ranks, driven Cicero 
and Virgil off the field. The vast extension 
of education, the prodigious present activity 
and energy of the human mind, the incessant 
efforts of the middle ranks to elevate and im- 
prove their worldly situation, afford, we fear, 
no reasonable grounds for hoping that this de- 
grading change can be arrested; on the con- 



trary, they are the very circumstances which 
afford a moral certainty that it will continue 
and increase. That the energy, expectations, 
and discontent now generally prevalent among 
the labouring classes, and appearing in the 
feverish desire for social amelioration and the 
ready reception of any projects, how vain so- 
ever, which promise to promote it, will lead to 
great and important changes in the condition 
both of government, society, and manners, is 
too obvious to require illustration. The in- 
tense and feverish attention to worldly objects 
which these changes at once imply and pro- 
duce ; the undue extension of artificial wants 
among the labouring poor which they ge- 
nerate; the severe competition to which all 
classes are in consequence exposed; the 
minute subdivision of labour which such a 
high and increasing state of manufacturing 
skill occasions ; the experienced impossibility 
of rising in any department without a thorough 
and exclusive attention to its details, are the 
very circumstances of all others the most fatal 
to the improvement of the understanding, or 
the regulation of the heart. Amidst the shock 
of so many contending interests, the calm pur- 
suits of science, which lead not to wealth, will 
be abandoned ; the institutions which as yet 
maintain it will be sacrificed to the increasing 
clamour of democratic jealousy; literature will 
become a mere stimulant to the passions, or 
amusement of an hour; religion, separated 
from its property, will become a trade in which 
the prejudices and passions of the congrega- 
tions of each minister will be inflamed instead 
of being subdued; every generous or enno- 
bling study will be discarded for the mere pur- 
suits of sordid wealth, or animal enjoyment; 
excitement in all its forms will become the 
universal object; and in the highest state of 
manufacturing skill, and in the latest stages 
of social regeneration, our descendants may 
sink irrecoverably into the degeneracy of Ro- 
man or Italian manners. 

The extension and improvement of the me- 
chanical arts — the multiplication of rail-roads, 
canals, and harbours — extraordinary rapidity 
of internal communication — increasing crav- 
ing for newspapers, and excitement in all its 
forms — the general spread of comfort, and 
universal passion of luxury, afford no antidote 
whatever against the native corruption of the 
human heart. We may go to Paris from Lon- 
don in three hours, and to Constantinople in 
twelve ; we may communicate with India, by 
the telegraph, in a forenoon, and make an au- 
tumnal excursion to the Pyramids orPersepo- 
lis in a fortnight, by steam-boats, and yet, 
amidst all our improvements, be the most de- 
graded and corrupt of the human race. Inter- 
nal communication was brought to perfection 
in the Roman empire, but did that revive the 
spirit of the legions, or avert the arms of the 
barbarians? Did it restore the age of Virgil 
and Cicero? Because all the citizens gazed 
daily on the most sumptuous edifices, and lived 
amidst a forest of the noblest statues, did that 
hinder the rapid corruption of manners, the 
irretrievable degeneracy of character, the total 
extinction of genius? Did their proud and 
ignorant contempt of the barbarous nations 



THE FUTURE. 



359 



save either the Greeks or the Romans from 
subjugation by a ruder and more savage, but a 
fresher and a nobler race! Were they not 
prating about the lights of the age, and the un- 
paralleled state of social refinement, when the 
swords of Alaric and Attila were already 
drawn? In the midst of all our excursions, 
have we yet penetrated that deepest of all mys- 
teries, the human heart ? With all our im- 
provements, have we eradicated one evil pas- 
sion or extinguished one guilty propensity in 
that dark fountain of evil? Alas ! facts, clear 
undeniable facts, prove the reverse — with the 
spread of knowledge, and the growth of every 
species of social improvement, general depra- 
vity has gone on increasing with an accele- 
rated pace, both in France and England, and 
every increase of knowledge seems but an ad- 
dition to the length of the lever by which vice 
dissolves the fabric of society.* 

It is not simple knowledge, it is knowledge 
detached from religion, that produces this fatal 
result, and unhappily that is precisely the spe- 
cies of knowledge which is the present object 
of fervent popular desire. The reason of its 
corrupting tendency on morals is evident — 
when so detached, it multiplies the desires and 
passions of the heart, without any increase to 
its regulating principles; it augments the at- 
tacking without strengthening the resisting 
powers, and thence the disorder and license it 
spreads through society. The invariable cha- 
racteristic of a declining and corrupt state of 
society, is a progressive increase in the force 
of passion, and a progressive decline in the 
influence of duty, and this tendency, so con- 
spicuous in France, so evidently beginning 
amongst ourselves, is increased by nothing so 
much as that spread of education without reli- 
gion, which is the manifest tendency of the 
present times. 

What renders it painfully clear that this 
corruption has not only begun, but has far ad- 
vanced amidst a large proportion of our peo- 
ple, is the evident decline in the effect of moral 
character upon political influence. It used to 
be the boast, and the deserved boast, of Eng- 
land, that talents the most commanding, de- 
scent the most noble, achievements the most 
illustrious, could not secure power without the 
aid of private virtue. These times are gone 
past. Depravity of character, sordidness of 
disposition, recklessness of conduct, are now 
no security whatever against political dema- 
gogues, wielding the very greatest political 
influence, nay, to their being held up as the 
object of public admiration, and possibly 
forced upon the government of the country. 
What has the boasted spread of education 
done to exclude such characters from political 
weight? Nothing — it is, on the contrary, the 
very thing which gives them their ascendency. 
The time has evidently arrived when the com- 
mission of political crimes, the stain of guilt, 
the opprobrium of disgrace, is no objection 
whatever with a large and influential party to 



* The curious tables of M Guerrin prove that in every 
department of France, without exception, genera] depra- 
vity is just in proportion to the extension of knowledge. 
" At one throw." says the candid Mr. Bulwer, "Tie has 
bowled down all our preconceived ideas on this vital 
subject."— See Bulwer's France, vol,, i, Appendix. 



political leaders, provided they possess the qua- 
lilies likely to insure success in their designs. 
" It is the fatal effect," says Madame de Stae'l, 
"of revolutions to obliterate altogether our 
ideas of right and wrong, and instead of the. 
eternal distinctions of morality and religion, 
apply no other test, in general estimation, to 
political actions but success." This affords a 
melancholy presage of what may be expected 
when the same vicious and degrading princi- 
ples are still more generally embraced and ap- 
plied to the ordinary transactions, characters, 
and business, of life. 

" If absolute power," says M. de Tocqueville, 
"were re-established amongst the democratic 
nations of Europe, I am persuaded that it 
would assume a new form, and appear under 
features unknown to our forefathers. There 
was a time in Europe, when the laws*and the 
consent of the people had invested princes 
with almost unlimited authority; but they 
scarcely ever availed themselves of it. I do 
not speak of the prerogatives of the nobility, 
of the authority of supreme courts of justice, 
of corporations and their chartered rights, or 
of provincial privileges, which served to break 
the blows of the sovereign authority, and to 
maintain a spirit of resistance in the nation. 
Independently of these political institutions — 
which, however opposed they might be to per- 
sonal liberty, served to keep alive the love of 
freedom in the mind of the public, and which 
may be esteemed to have been useful in this 
respect — the manners and opinions of the na- 
tion confined the royal authority within bar- 
riers which were not less powerful, although 
they were less conspicuous. Religion, the af- 
fections of the people, the benevolence of the 
prince, the sense of honour, family pride, pro- 
vincial prejudices, custom, and public opinion, 
limited the power of kings, and restrained their 
authority within an invisible circle. The con- 
stitution of nations was despotic at that time, 
but their manners were free. Princes had the 
right, but they had neither the means nor the 
desire, of doing whatever they pleased. 

" But what now remains of those barriers 
which formerly arrested the aggressions of 
tyranny? Since religion has lost its empire 
over the souls of men, the most prominent 
boundary which divided good from evil is 
overthrown ; the very elements of the moral 
world are indeterminate; the princes and the 
people of the earth are guided by chance ; and 
none can define the natural limits of despotism 
and the bounds of license. Long revolutions 
have forever destroyed the respect which sur- 
rounded the rulers of the state ; and since they 
have been relieved from the burden of public 
esteem, princes may henceforward surrender 
themselves without fear to the seductions of 
arbitrary power. 

"When kings find that the hearts of their 
subjects are turned towards them, they are 
clement, because they are conscious of their 
strength; and they are chary of the affections 
of their people, because the affection of their 
people is the bulwark of the throne. A mutual 
interchange of good-will then takes place be 
tween the prince and the people, which re- 
sembles the gracious intercourse of domestic 



360 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



society. The subjects may murmur at the 
sovereign's decree, but they are grieved to dis- 
please him ; and the sovereign chastises his sub- 
jects with the light hand of parental affection. 

" But when once the spell of royalty is broken 
in the tumult of revolution; when successive 
monarchs have crossed the throne, so as alter- 
nately to display to the people the weakness of 
their right and the harshness of their power, 
the sovereign is no longer regarded by any as 
the father of the state, and he is feared by all 
as its master. If he be weak, he is depised; 
if he be strung, he is detested. He is himself 
full of animosity and alarm; he finds that he 
is as a stranger in his own country, and he 
treats his subjects like conquered enemies. 

" When the provinces and the towns formed 
so many different nations in the midst of their 
common country, each of them had a will of 
his own, which was opposed to the general 
spirit of subjection ; but now that all the parts 
of the same empire, after having lost their im- 
munities, their customs, their prejudices, their 
traditions, and their names, are subjected and 
accustomed to the same laws, it is not more 
difficult to oppress them collectively, than it 
was formerly to oppress them singly. 

" Whilst the nobles enjoyed their power, and 
indeed long after that power was lost, the 
honour of aristocracy conferred an extraordi- 
nary degree of force upon their personal oppo- 
sition. They afforded instances of men who, 
notwithstanding their weakness, still enter- 
tained a high opinion of their personal value, 
and dared to cope single-handed with the efforts 
of the public authority. But at the present 
day, when all ranks are more and more con- 
founded, when the individual disappears in 
the throng, and is easily lost in the midst of a 
common obscurity, when the honour of mo- 
narchy has almost lost its empire without 
being succeeded by public virtue, and when 
nothing can enable man to rise above himself, 
who shall say at what point the exigencies of 
power and the servility of weakness will stop! 

" As long as family feeling was kept alive, 
the antagonist of oppression was never alone; 
he looked about him, and found his clients, 
his hereditary friends and his kinsfolk. If this 
support was wanting, he was sustained by his 
ancestors and animated by his posterity. But 
when patrimonial estates are divided, and when 
afew years suffice to confound the distinctions 
of a race, where can family feeling be found ? 
What force can there be in the customs of a 
country which has changed, and is still perpetu- 
ally changing its aspect; in which every act of 
tyranny has a precedent, and every crime an ex- 
ample ; in which there is nothing so old that its 
antiquity can save it from destruction, and no- 
thing so unparalleled that its novelty can pre- 
vent it from being done? What resistance 
can be offered by manners of so pliant a make, 
that they have already often yielded! What 
strength can even public opinion have re- 
tained, when no twenty persons are connected 
by a common tie ; when not a man, nor a fa- 
mily, nor chartered corporation, nor class, nor 
free institution, has the power of representing 
' r exerting that opinion ; and when every citi- 
zen — being equally weak, equally poor, and 



equally dependent — has only his personal im- 
potence to oppose to the organized force of the 
government? 

"The annals of France furnish nothing 
analogous to the condiiion in which that coun- 
try might then be thrown. But it may be more 
aptly assimilated to the times of old, and to 
those hideous eras of Roman oppression, when 
the manners of the people were corrupted, 
their traditions obliterated, their habits de- 
stroyed, their opinions shaken, and freedom ex- 
pelled from the laws, could find no refuge in 
the land; when nothing protected the citizens, 
and the citizens no longer protected themselves ; 
when human nature was the sport of man, and 
princes wearied out the clemency of Heaven 
before they exhausted the patience of their- 
subjects. Those who hope to revive the mo- 
narchy of Henry IV. or of Louis XIV., appear 
tome to be afflicted with mental blindness; 
and when I consider the present condition of 
several European nations — a condition to 
which all the others tend — I am led to believe 
that they will soon be left with no other alter- 
native than democratic liberty, or the tyranny 
of the Caesars." — Tocquevdk, ii. 247. 

We shall not stop to show how precisely 
those views of Tocqueville coincide with what 
we have invariably advanced in this miscel- 
lany, or to express the gratification we experi- 
ence at finding these principles now embraced 
by the ablest of the French Democratic party, 
after the most enlightened view of American 
institutions. We hasten, therefore, to show 
that these results of the French Revolution, 
melancholy and depressing as they are, are 
nothing more than the accomplishment of 
what, forty-five years ago, Mr. Burke prophe- 
sied of its ultimate effects. 

"The policy of such barbarous victors," 
says Mr. Burke, " who contemn a subdued 
people, and insult their inhabitants, ever has 
been to destroy all vestiges of the ancient 
country in religion, policy, laws, and manners, 
to confound all territorial limits, produce a 
general poverty, crush their nobles, princes, 
and pontiffs, to lay low every thing which 
lifted its head above the level, or which could 
serve to combine or rally, in their distresses, 
the disbanded people under the standard of old 
opinion. They have made France free in the 
manner in which their ancient friends to the 
rights of mankind freed Greece, Macedon, 
Gaul, and other nations. If their present pro- 
ject of a Republic should fail, all securities to 
a moderate freedom fail along with it; they 
have levelled and crushed together all the or- 
ders 'which they found under the monarchy; 
all the indirect restraints which mitigate des- 
potism are removed, insomuch that if mo- 
narchy should ever again obtain an entire as- 
cendency in France, under this or any other 
dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily 
tempered at setting out by the wise and virtu- 
ous counsels of the prince, the most completely 
arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth." 
—Burke, v. 328—333. 

Similar results must ultimately attend the 

triumph of the democratic principle in Great 

Britain and Ireland. The progress may, and 

I we trust will, be different ; less bloodshed and 



THE FUTURE. 



361 



suffering will attend its course; more vigor- 
ous and manly resistance will evidently be op- 
posed to the evil; the growth of corrupi inn will, 
we trust, be infinitely more slow, and the de- 
cline of the empire more dignified and becom- 
ing. But the final result, if the democrat ic 
principle maintains its present ascendency, 
will be the same. 

If we examine the history of the world with 
attention, we shall find, that amidst great occa- 
sional variations produced by secondary and 
inferior causes, two great powers have been 
at work from the earliest times; and, like the 
antagonist expansive and compressing force 
in physical nature, have, by their mutual and 
counteracting influence, produced the greatest 
revolutions and settlements in human affairs. 
These opposing forces are northern conquest 
and civilized democracy. Their agency ap- 
pears clear and forcible at the present times, 
and the spheres of their action are different; 
but mighty ultimate results are to attend their 
irresistible operation in the theatres destined 
by nature for their respective operation. 

We, who have, for eighteen years, so inva- 
riably and resolutely opposed the advances of 
democracy, and that equally when it raised its 
voice aloft on the seat of government, as when 
it lurked under the specious guise of free trade 
or liberality, will not be accused of being 
blinded in favour of its effects. We claim, 
therefore, full credit for sincerity, and deem 
some weight due to our opinion, when we as- 
sert that it is the great nioving poioer in human 
affairs, — the source of the greatest efforts of 
human genius, — and, when duly restrained from 
running into excess, the grand instrument of 
human advancement. It is not from ignorance 
of, or insensibility to, its prodigious effects, 
that we have proved ourselves so resolute in 
resisting its undue expansion : it is, on the con- 
trary, from a full appreciation of them, from a 
thorough knowledge of the vast results, whether 
for g« id or evil, which it invariably produces. 
It is the nature of the democratic passion to 
produce an inextinguishable degree of vigour 
and activity among the middling classes of 
society — to develope an unknown energy 
among their wide-spread ranks — to fill their 
bosoms with insatiable and often visionary 
projects of advancement and amelioration, and 
inspire them with an ardent desire to raise 
themselves individually and collectively in the 
world. Thence the astonishing results — some- 
times for good, sometimes for evil — which it 
produces. Its grand characteristic is energy, 
and energy not rousing the exertions merely 
of a portion ofsocietv, but awakening the dor- 
mant strength of millions; not producing mere- 
ly the chivalrous valourof the high-bred cava- 
lier, but drawing forth "the might that slum- 
bers in a peasant's arm." The greatest 
achievements of genius, the noblest efforts of 
heroism, that have illustrated the history of 
the species, have arisen from the efforts of this 
principle. Thence the fight of Marathon and 
the glories of Salamis — the genius of Greece 
and the conquests of Rome — the heroism of 
Sempach and the devotion of Haarlem — the 
paintings of Raphael and the poetry of Tasso 
— the energy which covered with a velvet car- 
46 



pet the slopes of the Alps, and the industry 
which bridled the stormy seas of the German 
ocean — the burning passions which carried 
the French legions to Cadiz and the Kremlin, 
and the sustained fortitude which gave to Bri- 
tain the dominion of the waves. Thence, too, 
in its wider and unrestrained excesses, the 
greatest crimes which have disfigured the dark 
annals of human wickedness — the massacres 
of Athens and the banishments of Florence — 
the carnage cf Marius and the proscriptions 
of the Triumvirate — the murders of Cromwell 
and the bloodshed of Robespierre. 

As the democratic, passion is thus a princi- 
ple of such vital and searching energy, so it is 
from it, when acting under due regulation and 
control, that the greatest and most durable ad- 
vances in social existence have sprung. Why 
are the shores of the Mediterranean the scene 
to which the pilgrim from every quarter of 
the globe journeys to visit at once the cradles 
of civilization, the birthplace of arts, of arms, 
of philosophy, of poetry, and the scenes of 
their highest and most glorious achievements'? 
Because freedom spread along its smiling 
shores; because the ruins of Athens and 
Sparta, of Rome and Carthage, of Tyre and 
Syracuse, lie on its margin ; because civiliza- 
tion, advancing with the white sails which 
glittered on its blue expanse, pierced, as if 
impelled by central heat, through the dark 
and barbarous regions of the Celtic race who 
peopled its shores. What gave Rome the 
empire of the world, and brought the vener- 
able ensigns bearing the words, " Senatus 
populusque Romanus," to the wall of Antoni- 
nus and the foot of the Atlas, the waters of 
the. Euphrates and the Atlantic Ocean ? Demo- 
cratic vigour. Democratic vigour, be it ob- 
served, duly coerced by Patrician power; the in- 
satiable ambition of successive consuls, guided 
by the wisdom of the senate; the unconquer- 
able and inexhaustible bands which, for cen- 
turies, issued from the Roman Forum. What 
has spread the British dominions over the 
habitable globe, and converted the ocean into 
a peaceful lake for its internal carriage, and 
made the winds the instruments of its blessings' 
to mankind ; and spread its race in vast and 
inextinguishable multitudes through the new 
world 1 Democratic ambition ; democratic am- 
bition, restrained and regulated at home by an 
adequate weight of aristocratic power; a go- 
vernment which, guided by the stability of the 
patrician, but invigorated by the activity of 
the plebeian race, steadily advanced in con- 
quest, renown, and moral ascendency, till its 
fleets overspread the sea, and it has become a 
matter of certainty, that half the globe must 
be peopled by its descendants. 

The continued operation of this undying 
vigour and energy is still more clearly evinced 
in the Anglo-American race, which originally 
sprung from the stern Puritans of Charles I.'s 
age, which have developed all the peculiarities 
of the democratic character in unrestrained 
profusion amidst the boundless wastes which 
lie open to their enterprise. M. Tocqueville 
has described, with equal justice and eloquence 
the extraordinary activity of these principles 
in the United States. 

2H 



362 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



"The inhabitants of the United States are I assemblies, the citizens salute the authorities 



never fettered by the axioms of their profes- 
sion; they escape from all the prejudices of 
their present station; they are not more at- 
tached to one line of operation than to another ; 
they are not more prone to employ an old 
method than a new one ; they have no rooted 
habits, and they easily shake off the influence 
which the habits of other nations might ex- 
ercise upon their minds, from a conviction 
that their country is unlike any other, and that 
its situation is without a precedent in the 
world. America is a land of wonders, in which 
every thing is in constant motion, and every 
movement seems an improvement. The idea 
of novelty is there indissolubly connected with 
the idea of amelioration. No natural boundary 
seems to be set to the efforts of man ; and what 
is not yet done is only what he has not yet 
attempted to do. 

"This perpetual change which goes on in 



of the day as the fathers of their country. 
Societies are formed which regard drunken- 
ness as the principal cause of the evils under 
which the state labours, and which solemnly 
bind themselves to give a constant example of 
temperance. 

"The great political agitation of the Ameri- 
can legislative bodies, which is the only kind 
of excitement that attracts the attention of fo- 
reign countries, is a mere episode or a sort of 
continuation of that universal movement which 
originates in the lowest classes of the people, 
and extends successively to all the ranks of 
society. It is impossible to spend more efforts 
in the pursuit of enjoyment." 

The great system of nature thus expands to 
our view. The democratic principle is the 
great moving power which expels from the 
old established centres of civilization the race 
of men to distant and unpeopled regions ; which 



the United States, these frequent vicissitudes < in the ancient world spread it with the Athe- 
of fortune, accompanied by such unforeseen nian galleys along the shores of the Mediter- 
fluctuations in private and in public wealth, • ranean, and with the Roman legions penetrated 
serve to keep the minds of the citizens in a ; the dark and savage forests of central Europe; 
perpetual state of feverish agitation, which , which laid the foundation, in the kingdoms 
admirably invigorates their exertions, and ; formed out of its provinces, of the supremacy 
keeps them in a state of excitement above the I of modern Europe, and is now with the British 
ordinary level of mankind. The whole life of j navy extending as far as the waters of the 
an American is passed like a game of chance, ! ocean roll ; peopling at once the new continent 



a revolutionary crisis, or a battle. As the same 
causes are continually in operation through- 
out the country, they ultimately impart an 
irresistible impulse to the national character. 
The American, taken as a chance specimen 
of his countrymen, must then be a man of 
singular warmth in his desires, enterprising, 
fond of adventure, and above all of innovation. 
The same bent is manifest in all that he does; 
he introduces it into his political laws, his re- 
ligious doctrines, his theories of social eco- 
nomy, and his domestic occupations; he bears 
it with him in the depth of the back- woods, as 
well as in the business of the city. It is this 
same passion, applied to maritime commerce, 
which makes him the cheapest and the quick- 
est trader in the world. 

"It is not impossible to conceive the sur- 
passing liberty which the Americans enjoy; 
some idea may likewise be formed of the ex- 
treme equality which subsists amongst them, 
but the political activity which pervades the 
United States must be seen in order to be 
understood. No sooner do you set foot upon 
the American soil than you are stunned by a 
kind of tumult; a confused clamour is heard 
on every side ; and a thousand simultaneous 
voices demand the immediate satisfaction of 
their social wants. Every thing is in motion 
around you: here, the people of one quarter 
of a town are met to decide upon the building 
of a church ; there, the election of a repre- 
sentative is going on ; a little further, the 
delegates of district are posting to the town in 
order to consult upon some local improve- 
ments; or in another place the labourers of a 
village quit their ploughs to deliberate upon 
the project of a road or a public school. Meet- 
ings are called for the sole purpose of declar 



of Australasia, and supplanting the sable mil- 
lions of Africa; piercing the primeval forests 
of Canada, and advancing with unceasing 
velocity towards the rocky mountains of 
America. Nor is it only by the subjects of 
Britain that this impelling force is felt. It 
exists in equal force among their descendants; 
and from the seats where the Puritan con- 
temporaries of Cromwell first sought an asy- 
lum from English oppression, an incessant 
craving, an unseen power, is for ever impel- 
ling multitudes to the yet untrodden forests of 
the west. 

"It cannot be denied that the British race 
has acquired an amazing preponderance over 
all the other European races in the New 
World; and that it is very superior to them in 
civilization, in industry, and in power. As 
long as it is only surrounded by desert or 
thinly-peopled countries, as long as it en- 
counters no dense population upon its route, 
through which it cannot work its way, it will 
assuredly continue to spread. The lines 
marked out by treaties will not stop it ; but it 
will everywhere transgress these imaginary 
barriers. 

" The geographical position of the British 
race in the New World is peculiarly favoura- 
ble to its rapid increase. Above its northern 
frontiers the icy regions of the Pole extend ; 
and a few degrees below its southern confines 
lies the burning climate of the Equator. The 
Anglo-Americans are therefore placed in the 
most temperate and habitable zone of the 
continent." 

" The distance from Lake Superior to the 
Gulf of Mexico extends from the 47th to the 
30th degree of latitude, a distance of more than 
twelve hundred miles, as the bird flies. The 



their disapprobation of the line of conduct frontier of the United States winds along the 
pursued by the government; whilst, in other | whole of this immense line; sometimes falling 



THE FUTURE. 



363 



within its limits, but more frequently extending 
far beyond it into the waste. It has been cal- 
culated that the whites advance every year a 
mean distance of seventeen miles along the 
whole of this vast boundary. Obstacles, such 
as an unproductive district, a lake, or an In- 
dian nation unexpectedly encountered, are 
sometimes met with. The advancing column 
then halts for a while; its two extremities fall! 
back upon themselves, and as soon as they | 
are re-united they proceed onwards. This j 
gradual and continuous progress of the Eu- 
ropean race towards the Rocky Mountains has 
the solemnity of a providential event; it is 
like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and 
daily driven onwards by the hand of God. 

" Within this first line of conquering settlers, 
towns are built, and vast states founded. In 
1790 there were only a few thousand pioneers 
sprinkled along the valleys of the Mississippi; 
and at the present day these valleys contain 
as many inhabitants as were to be found in 
the whole Union in 1790. Their population 
amounts to nearly four millions. The city of 
Washington was founded in 1800, in the very 
centre of the Union; but such are the changes 
which have taken place, that it now stands at 
one of the extremities; and the delegates of the 
most remote Western States are already obliged 
to perform a journey as long as that from 
Vienna to Paris. 

" It must not, then, be imagined that the im- 
pulse of the British race in the New World 
can be arrested. The dismemberment of the 
Union, and the hostilities which might ensue, 
the abolition of republican institutions, and the 
tyrannical government whu h might succeed 
it, may retard this impulse, but they cannot 
prevent it from ultimately full.] ling the desti- 
nies to which that race is reserved. No power 
upon earth can close upon the emigrants that 
fertile wilderness, which offers resources to all 
industry and a refuge from all want. Future 
events, of whatever nature they may be, will 
not deprive the Americans of their climate or 
of their inland seas, of their great rivers or of 
their exuberant soil. Nor will bad laws, revo- 
lutions, and anarchy, be able to obliterate that 
love of prosperity and that spirit of enterprise 
which seem to be the distinctive characteristics 
of their race, or to extinguish that knowledge 
which guides them on their way. 

" Thus, in the midst of the uncertain future, 
one event at least is sure. At a period which 
may be said to be near, (for we are speaking 
of the life of a nation,) the Anglo-Americans 
will alone cover the immense space contained 
between the polar regions and the tropics, ex- 
tending from the coast of the Atlantic to the 
shores of the Pacific Ocean ; the territory which 
will probably be occupied by the Anglo-Ameri- 
cans at some future time, may be computed to 
equal three quarters of Europe in extent. The 
climate of the Union is upon the whole prefer- 
able to that of Europe, and its natural advan- 
tages are not less great; it is therefore evident 
that its population will at some future time be 
proportionate to our own. Europe, divided as 
it is between so many different nations, and 
torn as it has been by incessant wars and the 
barbarous manners of the Middle Ages, has 
notwithstanding attained a population of 410 



inhabitants to the square league. What cause 
can prevent the United States from having as 
numerous a population in time]" 

" The time will therefore come when one 
hundred and fifty millions of men will be liv- 
ing in North America, equal in condition, the 
progeny of one race, owing their origin to the 
same cause, and preserving the same civiliza- 
tion, the same language, the same religion, the 
same habits, the same manners, and imbued 
with the same opinions, propagated under the 
same forms. The rest is uncertain, but this is 
certain; and it is a fact new to the world, a 
fact fraught with such portentous consequences 
as to baffle the efforts even of the imagina- 
tion." 

It is not without reason, therefore, that we 
set out in this speculation, with the observa- 
tion, that great and durable effects on human 
affairs are destined by Providence for the Bri- 
tish race. And it is too obvious to admit of 
dispute, that the democratic principle amongst 
us is the great moving power which thus im- 
pels multitudes of civilized beings into the 
wilderness of nature. Nothing but that prin- 
ciple could effect such a change. Civilized 
man rarely emigrates; under a despotic go- 
vernment never. What colonies has China 
sent forth to people the wastes of Asia! Are 
the Hindoos to be found spread over the vast 
archipelago of the Indian Ocean ? Republican 
Rome colonized the world; Republican Greece 
spread the light of civilization along the shores 
of the Mediterranean ; but Imperial Rome could 
never maintain the numbers of its own pro- 
vinces, and the Grecian empire slumbered on 
with a declining population for eleven hundred 
years. Is Italy, with its old civilized millions, 
or France, with its ardent and redundant pea 
santrv,-the storehouse of nations from whenct 
the European race is to be diffused over the 
world 1 The colonies of Spain, torn by inter- 
nal factions, and a prey to furious passions, 
are in the most miserable state, and constantly 
declining in numbers!* The tendency of 
nations in a high state of civilization ever is to 
remain at home; to become wedded to the 
luxuries and enjoyments, the habits and refine- 
ments of an artificial state of existence, and 
regard all other people as rude and barbarous, 
unfit for the society, unequal to the reception 
of civilized existence, to slumber on' for ages 
with a population, poor, redundant, and declin- 
ing. Such has for ages been the condition of 
the Chinese and thfe Hindoos, the Turks and 
the Persians, the Spaniards and the Italians; 
and hence no great settlements of mankind 
have proceeded from their loins. 

What, then, is the centrifugal force which 
counteracts this inert tendency, and impels 
man from the heart of wealth, from the bosom 
of refinement, from the luxuries of civilization, 
to the forests and the wilderness? What sends 
him forth into the desert, impelled by the 
energy of the savage character, but yet with 
all the powers and acquisitions of civilization 
at his command; with the axe in his hand, 
but the Bible in his pocket, and the rifle by 
his side! It is democracy which effects this 
prodigy; it is that insatiable passion which 



* Tocqueville, ii. 439. 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



overcomes alike the habits and affections of 
society, and sends forth the civilized pilgrim 
far from his kindred, far from his home, far 
from the bones of his fathers, to seek amidst 
Transatlantic wilds that freedom and inde- 
pendence which his native country can no 
longer afford. It is in the restless activity 
which it engenders, the feverish desire of ele- 
vation which it awakens in all classes, the 
longing after a state of existence unattainable 
in long established states which it produces, 
that the centrifugal force of civilized man is to 
be found. Above an hundred thousand emi- 
grants from Great Britain, in the year 1833, 
settled in the British colonies; nearly two 
hundred thousand annually pass over to the 
whole of North America from the British isles ; 
and amidst the strife of parties, the collision 
of interest, the ardent hopes and chimerical 
anticipations incident to these days of transi- 
tion, the English -race is profusely and indeli- 
bly transplanted into the boundless wastes 
prepared for its reception in the New World. 

As the democratic passion, however, is thus 
evidently the great moving power which is 
transferring the civilized European race to the 
remote corners of the earth, and the British 
navy, the vast vehicle raised up to supreme 
dominion, for its conveyance ; so it is of the 
utmost importance to observe, that if undue 
power is given to this impelling force, the ma- 
chine which is performing these prodigies may 
be destroyed, and the central force, instead of 
operating with a steady and salutary pressure 
upon mankind, suddenly burst its barriers, and 
for ever cease to affect their fortunes. A 
spring acts upon a machine only as long as it 
is loaded or restrained; remove the pressure, 
and its strength ceases to exist. This powerful 
and astonishing agency of the Anglo-Saxon race 
upon the fortunes of mankind, would be totally 
destroyed by the triumph of democracy in the 
British islands. Multitudes, indeed, during the 
convulsions consequent on so calamitous an 
event, would fly for refuge to the American 
shores, but in the grinding and irreversible 
despotism which would necessarily and speed- 
ily follow its occurrence, the vital energy would 
become extinct, which is now impelling the 
British race into every corner of the habitable 
earth. The stillness of despotism would suc- 
ceed the agitation of passion ; the inertness of 
aged civilization at once fall upon the bounded 
state. From the moment that British freedom 
is extinguished by the overthrow of aristocratic 
influence, and the erection of the Commons 
into despotic power, the sacred fire which now 
animates the vast fabric of its dominion will 
become extinct, and England will cease to 
direct the destinies of half the globe. The 
Conservative party in this country, therefore, 
are not merely charged with the preservation 
of its own freedom — they are intrusted with 
the destinies of mankind, and on the success 
of their exertions it depends whether the demo- 
cratic spirit in these islands is to be pre- 
served, as heretofore, in that subdued form 
which has directed its energy to the civiliza- 
tion of mankind, or to burst forth in those 
wild excesses which turn only to its own ruin, 
and the desolation of the world. 



While the naval strength and colonial domi- 
nions of England have steadily and unceas- 
ingly advanced in Western Europe, and its 
influence is in consequence spread over all the 
maritime regions of the globe, another, and an 
equally irresistible power, has risen up in the 
eastern hemisphere. If all the contests of 
centuries have turned to the advantage of the 
English navy, all the continental strifes have 
as unceasingly augmented the strength of Rus- 
sia. From the time of the Czar Peter, when 
it first emerged from obscurity to take a leading 
part in continental affairs, to the present mo- 
ment, its progress has been unbroken. Alone, 
of all other states, during that long period it 
has experienced no reverses, but constantly 
advanced in power, territory, and resources; 
for even the peace of Tilsit, which followed 
the disasters of Austerlitz and Friedland, was 
attended with an accession of territory. Dur- 
ing that period it has successively swallowed 
up Courland and Livonia, Poland, Finland, the 
Crimea, the Ukraine, Wallachia, and Molda- 
via. Its southern frontier is now washed by 
the Danube; its eastern js within fifty leagues 
of Berlin and Vienna; its advanced ports in 
the Baltic are almost within sight of Stock- 
holm ; its south-eastern boundary, stretching 
far over the Caucasus, sweeps down to Erivan 
and the foot of Mount Arrarat — Persia and 
Turkey are irrevocably subjected to its influ- 
ence; a solemn treaty has given it the com- 
mand of the Dardanelles ; a subsidiary Mus- 
covite force has visited Scutari, and rescued 
the Osmanlis from destruction; and the Sultan 
Mahmoud retains Constantinople only as the 
viceroy of the northern autocrat. 

The politicians of the day assert that Russia 
will fall to pieces, and its power cease to be 
formidable to Western Europe or Central Asia. 
They ne/er were more completely mistaken. 
Did Macedonia fall to pieces before it had sub- 
dued the Grecian commonwealths; or Persia 
before it had conquered the Assyrian mon- 
archy ; or the Goths and Vandals before they 
had subverted the Roman empire ? It is the 
general pressure of the north upon the south, 
not the force of any single state, which is the 
weight that is to be apprehended ; that pres- 
sure will not be lessened, but on the contrary 
greatly increased, if the vast Scythian tribes 
should separate into different empires. Though 
one Moscovite throne were to be established at 
St. Petersburg, a second at Moscow, and a 
third at Constantinople, the general pressure 
of the Russian race, upon the southern states 
of Europe and Asia, would not be one whit 
diminished. Still the delight of a warmer cli- 
mate, the riches of long established civiliza- 
tion, the fruits and wines of the south, the 
women of Italy or Circassia, would attract the 
brood of winter to the regions of the sun. The 
various tribes of ths German race, the Gothic 
and Vandal swarms, the Huns and the Ostro- 
goths, were engaged in fierce and constant 
hostility with each other; and it was generally 
defeat and pressure from behind which im- 
pelled them upon their southern neighbours ; 
but that did not prevent them from bursting 
the barriers of the Danube and the Rhine, and 
overwhelming the civilization, and wealth, and 



THE FUTURE. 



365 



discipline of the Roman empire. Such inter- 
nal divisions only magnify the strength of the 
northern race by training them to the use of 
arms, and augmenting their military skill by 
constant exercise against each other; just as 
the long continued internal wars of the Euro- 
pean nations have established an irresistible 
superiority of their forces over those of the 
other quarters of the globe. In the end, the 
weight of the north thus matured, drawn forth 
and disciplined, will ever be turned to the 
fields of southern conquest. 

The moving power with these vast bodies 
of men is the lust of conquest, and a passion 
for southern enjoyment. Democracy is un- 
heeded or unknown amongst them ; if im- 
ported from foreign lands it languishes and 
expires amidst the rigours of the climate. The 
energy and aspirations of men are concen- 
trated on conquest ; a passion more natural, 
more durable, more universal than the demo- 
cratic vigour of advanced civilization. It 
speaks a language intelligible to the rudest of 
men ; and rouses the passions of universal 
vehemence. Great changes may take place 
in human affairs ; but the time will never 
come when northern valour will not press on 
southern wealth; or refined corruption not 
require the renovating influence of indigent 
regeneration. 

This then is the other great moving power 
which in these days of transition is changing 
the destinies of mankind. Rapid as is the 
growth of the British race in America, it is 
not more rapid than that of the Russian in 
Europe and Asia. Fifty millions of men now 
furnish recruits to the Moscovite standards ; 
but their race doubles in every half century; 
and before the year 1900, one hundred millions 
of men will be ready to pour from the frozen 
plains of Scythia on the plains of Central Asia 
and southern Europe. Occasional events may 
check or for a while turn aside the wave ; but 
its ultimate progress in these directions is cer- 
tain and irresistible. Before two centuries are 
over, Mohammedanism will be banished from 
Turkey, Asia Minor, and Persia, and a hundred 
millions of Christians will be settled in the 
regions now desolated by the standards of the 
Prophet. Their advance is as swift, as un- 
ceasing as that of the British race to the rocky 
belt of western America. 

" There are, at the present time, two great 
nations in the world, which seem to tend to- 
wards the same end, although they started 
from different points : I allude to the Russians 
and the Americans. Both of them have grown 
up unnoticed : and whilst the attention of 
mankind was directed elsewhere, they have 
suddenly assumed a most prominent place 
amongst the nations; and the world learned 
their existence and their greatness at almost 
the same time. 

"All other nations seem to have nearly 
reached their natural limits, and only to be 
charged with the maintenance of their power; 
but these are still in the act of growth, all the 
others are stopped, or continue to advance 
with extreme difficulty; these are proceeding 
with ease and with celerity along a path to 
winch the human eye can assign no term. 



The American struggles against the natural 
obstacles which oppose him; the adversaries 
of the Russian are men : the former combats 
the wilderness and,«savage life ; the latter, civi- 
lization with all its weapons and its arts ; the 
conquests of the one are therefore gained by 
the plough-share ; those of the other by the 
sword. The Anglo-American relies upon per- 
sonal interest to accomplish his ends, and 
gives free scope to the unguided exertions and 
common sense of the citizens; the Russian 
centres all the authority of society in a single 
arm ; the principal instrument of the former 
is freedom ; of the latter, servitude. Their 
starting-point is different, and their courses 
are not the same ; yet each of them seems to 
be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway 
the destinies of half the globe." 

There is something solemn and evidently 
providential in this ceaseless advance of the 
lords of the earth and the sea, into the deserted 
regions of the earth. The hand of Almighty 
power is distinctly visible, not only in the un- 
broken advance of both on their respective 
elements, but in the evident adaptation of the 
passions, habits, and government of each to 
the ends for which they were severally des- 
tined in the designs of nature. Would Rus- 
sian conquest have ever peopled the dark and 
untrodden forests of North America, or the 
deserted Savannahs of Australasia"? Would 
the passions and the desires of the north have 
ever led them into the abode of the beaver and 
the buffalo 1 Never ; for aught that their pas- 
sions could have done these regions must have 
remained in primeval solitude and silence to 
the end of time. Could English democracy 
ever have penetrated the half-peopled, half- 
desert regions of Asia, and Christian civiliza- 
tion, spreading in peaceful activity, have sup- 
planted the Crescent in the original seats of the 
human race"? Never; the isolated colonist, 
with his axe and his Bible, would have been 
swept away by the Mameluke or the Spahi, 
and civilization, in its peaceful guise, would 
have perished under the squadrons of the 
Crescent. For aught that democracy could 
have done for Central Asia it must have re- 
mained the abode of anarchy and misrule to 
the end of' kuman existence. But peaceful 
Christianity, urged on by democratic passions, 
pierced the primeval solitude of the American 
forests; and warlike Christianity, stimulated 
by northern conquest, was fitted to subdue 
Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The Bible 
and the printing press converted the wilder- 
ness of North America into the abode of 
Christian millions; the Moscovite battalions, 
marching under the standard of the Cross, 
subjugated the already peopled regions of the 
Mussulman faith. Not without reason then 
did the British navy and the Russian army 
emerge triumphant from the desperate strife 
of the French Revolution ; for on the victory oi 
each depended the destinies of half the globe. 

Democratic institutions will not and cannot 
exist permanently in North America. The 
frightful anarchy which has prevailed in the 
southern states, since the great interests de- 
pendent on slave emancipation were brought 
into jeopardy — the irresistible sway of the 
2 h 2 



366 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



majority, and the rapid tendency of that ma- 
jority to deeds of atrocity and blood — the in- 
creasing jealousy, on mercantile grounds, of 
the northern and southern states, all demon- 
strate that the Union cannot permanently hold 
together, and that the innumerable millions of 
the Anglo-American race must be divided into 
separate states, like the descendants of the 
Gothic conquerors of Europe. Out of this 
second great settlement of mankind will arise 
separate kingdoms, and interests, and passions, 
as out of the first. But democratic habits and 
desires will still prevail, and long after neces- 
sity and the passions of an advanced stage of 
civilization have established firm and aristo- 
cratic governments, founded on the sway of 
property in the old states, republican ambition 
and jealousy will not cease to impel millions 
to the great wave that approaches the Rocky 
Mountains. Democratic ideas will not be mo- 
derated in the New World, till they have per- 
formed their destined end, and brought the 
Christian race to the shores of the Pacific. 

Arbitrary institutions will not for ever pre- 
vail in the Russian empire. As successive 
provinces and kingdoms are added to their vast 
dominions — as their sway extends over the 
regions of the south, the abode of wealth and 
long-established civilization, the passion for 
conquest will expire. Satiety will extinguish 
this as it does all other desires. With the ac- 
quisition of wealth, and the settlement in fixed 
abodes, the desire of protection from arbitrary 
power will spring up, and the passion of free- 
dom will arise as it did in Greece, Italy, and 
modern Europe. Free institutions will ulti- 
mately appear in the realms conquered by Mos- 
covite, as they did in those won by Gothic va- 
lour. But the passions and desires of an 
earlier stage of existence will long agitate the 
millions of the Russo-Asiatic race ; and after 
democratic desires have arisen, and free in- 
stitutions exist in its oldest provinces, the 
wave of northern conquest will still be pressed 
on by semi-barbarous hordes from its remoter 
dominions. Freedom will gradually arise out 
of security and repose ; but the fever of con- 
quest will not be finally extinguished till it has 
performed its destined mission, and the stand- 
ards of the Cross are brought dawn to the In- 
dian Ocean. 

The French Revolution was the greatest and 
the most stupendous event of modern times ; 
it is from the throes consequent on its explo- 
sion that all the subsequent changes in human 
affairs have arisen. It sprung up in the spirit 
of infidelity ; it was early steeped in crime ; it 
reached the unparalleled height of general 
atheism, and shook all the thrones of the world 
by the fiery passions which it awakened. What 
was the final result of this second revolt of 
Lucifer, the Prince of the Morning? Was it 
that a great and durable impression on human 
affairs was made by the infidel race 1 Was 
St. Michael at last chained by the demon 1 
No ! it was overruled by Almighty Power; on 
either side it found the brazen walls which it 
could not pass; it sunk in the conflict, and 
ceased to have any farther direct influence on 
human affairs. In defiance of all its efforts 
the British navy and the Russian army rose 
invincible above its arms ; the champions of 



Christianity in the east and the leaders of re- 
ligious freedom in the west, came forth, like 
giants refreshed with wine, from the termina- 
tion of the fight. The infidel race which 
aimed at the dominion of the world, served 
only by their efforts to increase the strength 
of its destined rulers ; and from amidst the 
ruins of its power emerged the ark, which was 
to carry the tidings of salvation to the west- 
ern, and the invincible host which was to 
spread the glad tidings of the gospel through 
the eastern world. 

Great, however, as were the powers thus let 
into human affairs, their operation must have 
been comparatively slow, and their influence 
inconsiderable, but for another circumstance 
which at the same time came into action. But 
a survey of human affairs leads to the conclu- 
sion, that when important changes in the social 
world are about to take place, a lever is not 
long of being supplied to work out the prodigy. 
With the great religious change of the sixteenth 
century arose the art of printing; with the 
vast revolutions of the nineteenth, an agent of 
equal efficacy was provided. At the time, when 
the fleets of England were riding omnipotent 
on the ocean, at the very moment when the 
gigantic hosts of infidel and revolutionary 
power were scattered by the icy breath of 
winter, steam navigation was brought into 
action, and an agent appeared upon the theatre 
of the universe, destined to break through the 
most formidable barriers of nature. In Janu- 
ary, 1812, not one steam vessel existed in the 
world; now, on the Mississippi alone, there 
are a hundred and sixty. Vain hereafter are 
the waterless deserts of Persia, or the snowy 
ridges of the Himalaya — vain the impenetra- 
ble forests of America, or the deadly jungles 
of Asia. Even the death bestrodden gales of 
the Niger must yield to the force of scientific 
enterprise, and the fountains of the Nile 
themselves emerge from the awful obscurity 
of six thousand years. The great rivers of 
the world are now the highways of civilization 
and religion. The Russian battalions will 
securely commit themselves to the waves of 
the Euphrates, and waft again to the plains of 
Shinar the blessings of regular government 
and a beneficent faith; remounting the St. 
Lawrence and the Missouri, the British emi- 
grants will carry into the solitudes of the far 
west the Bible, and the wonders of English 
genius. Spectators of, or actors in, so mar- 
vellous a progress, let us act as becomes men 
called to such mighty destinies in human 
affairs ; let us never forget that it is to regulated 
freedom alone that these wonders are to be as- 
cribed ; and contemplate in the degraded and 
impotent condition of France, when placed 
beside these giants of the earth, the natural 
and deserved result of the revolutionary pas- 
sions and unbridled ambition which extin- 
guished prospects once as fair, and destroyed 
energies once as powerful, as that which now 
directs the destinies of half the globe.* 



* Some of the preceding paragraphs have been trans- 
ferred into the last chapter of the History of Europe 
during the French Revolution : but they are ret, lined 
here, where they originally appeared, as essentially con- 
nected with the subject treated of and speculations 
hazarded in this volume. 



GUIZOT. 



867 



GUIZOT.* 



Machtavel was the first historian who seems 
iO have formed a conception of the philosophy 
of history. Before his time, the narrative of 
human events was little more than a series of 
biographies, imperfectly connected together by 
a few slight sketches of the empires on which 
the actions of their heroes were exerted. In 
this style of history, the ancient writers were, 
and to the end of time probably will continue 
to be, altogether inimitable. Their skill .in 
narrating a story, in developing the events of 
a life, in tracing the fortunes of a city or a 
state, as they were raised by a succession of 
illustrious patriots, or sunk by a series of op- 
pressive tyrants, has never been approached in 
modern times. The histories of Xenophon and 
Thucydides, of Livy and Sallust, of Caesar and 
Tacitus, are all more or less formed on this 
model ; and the more extended view of history, 
as embracing an account of the countries the 
transactions of which were narrated, originally 
formed, and to a great part executed by the 
father of history, Herodotus, appears to have 
been, in an unaccountable manner, lost by his 
successors. 

In these immortal works, however, human 
transactions are uniformly regarded as they 
have been affected by, or called forth the 
agency of, individual men. We are never 
presented with the view of society in a m>iss ; 
as influenced by a series of causes and effects 
independent of the agency of individual man — 
or, to speak more correctly, in the development 
of which the agency is an unconscious, and 
often almost a passive, instrument. Constantly 
regarding history as an extensive species of 
biography, they not only did not withdraw the 
eye to the distance necessary to obtain such a 
general view of the progress of things, but they 
did the reverse. Their great object was to 
bring the eye so close as to see the whole vir- 
tues or vices of the principal figures which 
they exhibited on their moving panorama; and 
in so doing, they rendered it incapable of per- 
ceiving, at the same time, the movement of the 
whole social body of which they formed a part. 
Even Livy, in his pictured narrative of Roman 
victories, is essentially biographical. His 
inimitable work owes its enduring celebrity to 
the charming episodes of individuals, or gra- 
phic pictures of particular events, with which 
it abounds ; scarce any general views on the 
progress of society, or the causes to which its 
astonishing progress in the Roman state was 
owing, are to be found. In the introduction to 
the life of Catiline, Sallust has given, with 
tinequalled power, a sketch of the causes which 
corrupted the republic ; and if his work had 
been pursued in the same style, it would indeed 
have been a philosophical history. But neither 
the Catiline nor the Jugurthine war are histo- 
ries ; they are chapters of history, containing 
two interesting biographies. Scattered through 



* Blackwood's Magazine, Dec. 1844. 



the writings of Tacitus are to be found nume- 
rous caustic and profound observations on 
human nature, and the increasing vices and 
selfishness of a corrupted age ; but like the 
maxims of Rochefoucault, it is to individual, 
not general, humanity that they refer; and 
they strike us as so admirably just, because 
they do not describe general causes operating 
upon society as a body — which often make 
little impression, save on a few reflecting 
minds — but strike direct to the human heart, 
in a way which comes home to the breast of 
every individual who reads them. 

Never was a juster observation than that the 
human mind is never quiescent; it may not 
give the external symptoms of action, but it 
does not cease to have the internal movement: 
it sleeps, but even then it dreams. Writers 
innumerable have declaimed on the night of 
the Middle Ages — on the deluge of barbarism 
which, under the Goths, flooded the world — on 
the torpor of the human intellect, under the 
combined pressure of savage violence and 
priestly superstition ; yet this was precisely 
the period when the minds of men, deprived of 
external vent, turned inwards on themselves ; 
and that the learned and thoughtful, shut out 
from any active part in society by the general 
prevalence of military violence, sought, in the 
solitude of the cloister, employment in reflect- 
ing on the mind itself, and the general causes 
which, under its guidance, operated upon so- 
ciety. The influence of this great change in 
the direction of thought, at once appeared 
when knowledge, liberated from the monastery 
and the university, again took its place among 
the affairs of men. Machiavel in Italy, and 
Bacon in England, for the first time in the an- 
nals of knowledge, reasoned upon human 
affairs as a science. They spoke of the minds 
of men as permanently governed by certain 
causes, and of known principles always lead- 
ing to the same results ; they treated of politics 
as a science in which certain known laws ex- 
isted, and could be discovered, as in mechanics 
and hydraulics. This was a great step in ad- 
vance, and demonstrated that the superior age 
of the world, and the wider sphere to which 
political observation had now been applied, 
had permitted the accumulation of such an in- 
creased store of facts, as permitted deductions, 
founded on experience, to be formed in regard 
to the affairs of nations. Still more, it showed 
that the attention of writers had been drawn to 
the general causes of human progress ; that 
they reasoned on the actions of men as a sub- 
ject of abstract thought; regarded effects for- 
merly produced as likely to recur from a similar 
combination of circumstances; and formed 
conclusions for the regulation of future con- 
duct, from the results of past experience. 
This tendency is, in an especial manner, con- 
spicuous in the Discorsi of Machiavel, where 
certain general propositions are stated, de- 
duced, indeed, from the events of Roman story 



368 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



but announced as lasting truths, applicable to 
every future generation and circumstances of 
men. In depth of view and justness of obser- 
vation, these views of the Florentine statesman 
never were surpassed. Bacon's essays relate, 
for the most part, to subjects of morals, or do- 
mestic and private life ; but not unfrequently 
he touches on the general concerns of nations, 
and Math the same profound observation of the 
past, and philosophic anticipation of the future. 

Voltaire professed to elevate history in France 
from the jejune and trifling details of genealogy, 
courts, wars, and negotiations, in which it 
had, hitherto, in his country, been involved, to 
the more general contemplation of arts and 
philosophy, and the pi-ogress of human affairs ; 
and, in some respects, he certainly effected a 
great reformation on the ponderous annalists 
who had preceded him. But the foundation 
of his history was still biography ; he regarded 
human events only as they were grouped round 
two or three great men, or as they were influ- 
enced by the speculations of men of letters and 
science. The history of France he stigmatized 
as savage and worthless till the reign of Louis 
XIV.; the Russians he looked upon as no bet- 
ter than barbarians till the time of Peter the 
Great. He thought the philosophers alone all 
in all ; till they arose, and a sovereign ap- 
peared who collected them round his throne, 
and shed on them the rays of royal favour, 
human events were not worth narrating; they 
•were merely the contests of one set of savages 
plundering another. Religion, in his eyes, was 
a mere priestly delusion, to enslave and be- 
nighten mankind ; from its oppression the 
greatest miseries of modern times had flowed ; 
the first step in the emancipation of the human 
mind was to chase for ever from the earth 
those sacerdotal tyrants. The most free- 
thinking historian will now admit, that these 
views are essentially erroneous ; he will allow 
that, viewing Christianity merely as a human 
institution, its effect in restraining the violence 
of feud a*, anarchy was incalculable ; long ante- 
rior to the date of the philosophers, he will look 
for the broad foundation on which national 
character and institutions, for good or for evil, 
have been formed. Voltaire was of great ser- 
vice to history, by turning it from courts and 
camps to the progress of literature, science, 
and the arts — to the delineation of manners, 
and the preparation of anecdotes descriptive 
of character; but notwithstanding all his talent, 
iie never got a glimpse of the general causes 
which influence society. He gave us the his- 
tory of philosophy, but not the philosophy of 
history. 

The ardent genius and pictorial eye of Gib- 
bon rendered him an incomparable delineator 
of events; and his powerful mind made him 
ieize the general and characteristic features of 
society and manners, as they appear in dif- 
ferent parts of the world, as well as the traits 
of individual greatness. His descriptions of 
the Roman Empire, in the zenith of its power, 
as it existed in the time of Augustus — of its de- 
cline and long-protracted old age, under Con- 
stantine and his successors on the Byzantine 
throne — of the manners of the pastoral nations, 
who, under different names, and for a succes- 



sion of ages, pressed upon and at last over- 
turned the empire — of the Saracens, who, 
issuing from the sands of Arabia, with the 
Koran in one hand and the cirneter in the 
other, urged on their resistless course, till they 
were arrested by the Atlantic on the one side 
and the Indian ocean on the other — of the stern 
crusaders, who, nursed amid the cloistered 
shades and castellated realms of Europe, strug- 
gled with that devastating horde " when 'twas 
strongest, and ruled it when 'twas wildest" — 
of the long agony, silent decay, and ultimate 
resurrection of the Eternal City — are so many 
immortal pictures, which, to the end of the 
world, will fascinate every ardent and imagin- 
ative mind. But, notwithstanding this incom- 
parable talent for general and characteristic 
description, he had not the mind necessary for 
a philosophical analysis of the series of causes 
which influence human events. He viewed 
religion with a jaundiced and prejudiced eye — 
the fatal bequest of his age and French educa- 
tion, unworthy alike of his native candour and 
inherent strength of understanding. He had 
profound philosophic ideas, and occasionally 
let them out with admirable effect ; but the turn 
of his mind was essentially descriptive, and 
his powers were such in that brilliant depart- 
ment, that they wiled him from the less inviting 
contemplation of general causes. We turn 
over his fascinating pages without wearying; 
but without ever discovering the general pro- 
gress or apparent tendency of human affairs. 
We look in vain for the profound reflections 
of Machiavel on the permanent results of cer- 
tain political combinations or experiments. 
He has led us through a "mighty maze," but 
he has made no attempt to show it "not without 
a plan." 

Hume is commonly called a philosophical 
historian, and so he is ; but he has even less 
than Gibbon the power of unfolding the gene- 
ral causes which influence the progress of 
human events. He was not, properly speak- 
ing, a philosophic historian, but a philosopher 
writing history — and these are very different 
things. The experienced statesman will often 
make a better delineator of the progress of 
human affairs than the philosophic recluse ; 
for he is more practically acquainted with 
their secret springs: it was not in the schools, 
but the forum or the palace, that Sallust, Ta- 
citus, and Burke acquired their deep insight 
into the human heart. Hume was gifted with 
admirable sagacity in political economy ; and 
it is the good sense and depth of his views on 
that important subject, then for the first time 
brought to bear on the annals of man, that has 
chiefly gained for him, and with justice, the 
character of a philosophic historian. To this 
may be added the inimitable clearness and 
rhetorical powers with which he has stated 
the principal arguments for and against the 
great changes in the English institutions 
which it fell to his lot to recount — arguments 
far abler than were either used by, or occurred 
to, the actors by whom they were brought 
about; for it is seldom that a Hume is found 
in the councils of men. With equal ability, 
too, he has given periodical sketches of man- 
ners, customs, and habits, mingled with valu- 



GUIZOT. 



363 



able details on finance, commerce, and prices 
— all elements, and most important ones, in 
the formation of philosophical history. We 
owe a deep debt of gratitude to the man who 
has rescued these valuable facts from the 
ponderous folios where they were slumbering 
in forgotten obscurity, and brought them into 
the broad light of philosophic observation and 
popular narrative. But, notwithstanding all 
this, Hume is far from being gifted with the 
philosophy of history. He has collected or 
prepared many of the facts necessary for the 
science, but he has made little progress in it 
himself. He was essentially a skeptic. He 
aimed rather at spreading doubts than shed- 
ding light. Like Voltaire and Gibbon, he was 
scandalously prejudiced and unjust on the 
subject of religion ; and to write modern his- 
tory without correct views on that subject, is 
like playing Hamlet without the character of 
the Prince of Denmark. He was too indolent 
to acquire the vast store of facts indispensable 
for correct generalization on the varied theatre 
of human affairs, and often drew hasty and 
incorrect conclusions from the events which 
particularly came under his observation. Thus 
the repeated indecisive battles between the 
fleets of Charles II. and the Dutch, drew from 
him the observation, apparently justified by 
their results, that sea-fights are seldom so im- 
portant or decisive as those at land. The fact 
is just the reverse. Witness the battle of Sa- 
Jamis, which repelled from Europe the tide of 
Persian invasion; that of Actium, which gave 
a master to the Roman world ; that of Sluys, 
which exposed France to the dreadful English 
invasions, begun under Edward III.; that of 
Lepanto, which rolled back from Christendom 
the wave of Mohammedan conquest ; the defeat 
of the Armada, which permanently established 
the Reformation in Northern Europe; that of 
La Hogue, which broke the maritime strength 
•of Louis XIV.; that of Trafalgar, which for 
ever took " ships, colonies, and commerce'' 
from Napoleon, and spread them with the 
British colonial empire over half the globe. 

Montesquieu owes his colossal reputation 
chiefly to his Esprit des Loix ; but the Grandeur 
■et Decadence des Romains is by much the greater 
work. It has never attained nearly the repu- 
tation in this country which it deserves, either 
in consequence of the English mind being less 
partial than the French to the philosophy of 
human affairs, or, as is more probable, from 
the system of education at our universities 
being so exclusively devoted to the study of 
words, that our scholars seldom arrive at the 
knowledge of things. It is impossible to ima- 
gine a work in which the philosophy of his- 
<tory is more ably condensed, or where there 
is exhibited, in a short space, a more profound 
view of the general causes to which the long- 
■continued greatness and ultimate decline of that 
celebrated people were owing. It is to be re- 
gretted only that he did not come to modern 
times and other ages with the same masterly 
survey; the information collected in the Esprit 
des Loix would have furnished him with ample 
materials for such a work. In that noble trea- 
tise, the same philosophic and generalizing 
spirit is conspicuous ; but there is too great a 
47 



love of system, an obvious partiality for fan- 
ciful analogies, and, not unfrequently, conclu- 
sions hastily deduced from insufficient data. 
These errors, the natural result of a philoso- 
phic and profound mind wandering without a 
guide in the mighty maze of human transac- 
tions, are entirely avoided in the Grandeur et 
Decadence des Romains, where he was retained 
by authentic history to a known train of 
events, and where his imaginative spirit and 
marked turn for generalization found suffi- 
cient scope, and no more, to produce the 
most perfect commentary on the annals of a 
single people of which the human mind can 
boast. 

Bossuet, in his Universal History, aimed at a 
higher object; he professed to give nothing 
less than a development of the plan of Provi- 
dence, in the government of human affairs, 
during the whole of antiquity, and down to 
the reign of Charlemagne. The idea was 
magnificent, and the mental powers, as well 
as eloquence, of the Bishop of Meaux pro- 
mised the greatest results from such an under- 
taking. But the execution has by no means 
corresponded to the conception. Voltaire has 
said, that he professed to give a view of uni- 
versal history, and he has only given the his- 
tory of the Jews ; and there is too much truth 
in the observation. He never got out of the 
fetters of his ecclesiastical education ; the 
Jews were the centre round which he sup- 
posed all other nations revolved. His mind 
was polemical, not philosophic ; a great theo- 
logian, he was but an indifferent historian. 
In one particular, indeed, his observations are 
admirable, and, at times, in the highest degree 
impressive. He never loses sight of the di- 
vine superintendence of human affairs ; he 
sees in all the revolutions of empires the 
progress of a mighty plan for the ultimate 
redemption of mankind ; and he traces the 
workings of this superintending power in all 
the transactions of man. But it may be doubt- 
ed whether he took the correct view of this 
sublime but mysterious subject. He supposes 
the divine agency to influence directly the af- 
fairs of men — not through the medium of ge- 
neral laws, or the adaptation of our active 
propensities to the varying circumstances of 
our condition. Hence his views strike at the 
freedom of human actions ; he makes men 
and nations little more than the puppets by 
which the Deity works out the great drama 
of human affairs. Without disputing the re- 
ality of such immediate agency in some par- 
ticular cases, it may safely be affirmed, that 
by far the greater part of the affairs of men 
are left entirely to their own guidance, and 
that their actions are overruled, not directed, 
by Almighty power to work out the purposes 
of Divine beneficence. 

That which Bossuet left undone, Robertson 
did. The first volume of his Charles V. may 
justly be regarded as the greatest step which 
the human mind had yet made in the philoso- 
phy of history. Extending his views beyond 
the admirable survey which Montesquieu had 
given of the rise and decline of the Roman 
empire, he aimed at giving a view of the pro- 
gress of society in modern times. This matter, 



270 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



of the progress of society, was a favourite 
subject at that period with political philoso- 
phers; and by combining the speculations of 
these ingenious men with the solid basis of 
facts which his erudition and industry had 
worked out, Robertson succeeded in produc- 
ing the most luminous, and at the same time 
just, view of the progress of nations that had 
yet been exhibited among mankind. The phi- 
losophy of history here appeared in its full 
lustre. Men and nations were exhibited in 
their just proportions. Society was viewed, 
not only in its details, but its masses ; the 
general causes which influence its progress, 
running into or mutually affecting each other, 
and yet all conspiring with more or less effi- 
cacy to bring about a general result, Ave re ex- 
hibited in the most lucid and masterly manner. 
The great causes which have contributed to 
form the elements of modern society — the de- 
caying civilization of Rome — the irruption of 
the northern nations — the prostration and de- 
gradation of the conquered people — the revival 
of the military spirit with the private Avars of 
the nobles — the feudal system and institution 
of chivalry — the crusades, and reviA-al of let- 
ters following the capture of Constantinople 
by the Turks — the invention of printing, and 
consequent extension of knowledge to the 
great body of the people — the discovery of the 
compass, and, with it, of America, by Colum- 
bus, and doubling of the Cape of Good Hope 
by Vasco de Gama — the invention of gunpow- 
der, and prodigious change thereby effected in 
the implements of human destruction — are all 
there treated in the most luminous manner, 
and, in general, with the justest discrimina- 
tion. The vast agency of general causes upon 
the progress of mankind now became appa- 
rent : unseen powers, like the deities of Homer 
in the Avar of Troy, Avere seen to mingle at 
every step with the tide of sublunary affairs ; 
and so powerful and irresistible does their 
agency, Avhen once revealed, appear, that we 
are perhaps now likely to fall into the oppo- 
site extreme, and to ascribe too little to indi- 
A'idual effort or character. Men and nations 
seem to be alike borne forward on the surface 
of a mighty stream, which they are equally in- 
capable of arresting or directing; and, after 
surveying the vain and impotent attempts of 
individuals to extricate themselves from the 
current, we are apt to exclaim with the philo- 
sopher,* "He has dashed with his oar to 
hasten the cataract ; he has waved with his 
fan to give speed to the winds." 

A nearer examination, however, will con- 
vince every candid inquirer, that individual 
character exercises, if not a paramount, yet a 
very powerful influence on human affairs. 
Whoever investigates minutely any period of 
history will find, on the one hand, that general 
causes affecting the Avhole of society are iu 
constant operation ; and on the other, that 
these general causes themselves are often set 
in motion, or directed in their effects, by par- 
ticular men. Thus, of what efficacy were the 
constancy of Pitt, the foresight of Burke, the 
arm of Nelson, the Avisdom of Wellington, the 



* Ferguson. 



genius of Wellesley, in bringing to maturity 
the British empire, and spreading the Anglo- 
Saxon race, in pursuance of its appointed 
mission, over half the globe ! What marvel- 
lous effect had the heroism and skill of Robert 
Bruce upon the subsequent history of Scot- 
land, and, through it, on the fortunes of the 
British race ! Thus biography, or the deeds 
or thoughts of illustrious men, still forms a 
most important, and certainly the most inte- 
resting, part even of general history ; and the 
perfection of that noble art consists, not in the 
exclusive delineation of individual achieve- 
ment, or the concentration of attention on ge- 
neral causes, but in the union of the two in 
due proportions, as they really exist in nature, 
and determine, by their combined operation, 
the direction of human affairs. The talent 
noAv required in the histoi - ian partakes, ac- 
cordingly, of this tAvo-fold character. He is 
expected to Avrite at once philosophy and bio- 
graphy : to unite skill in drawing individual 
character, the power of describing individual 
achievements, with a clear perception of gene- 
ral causes, and the generalizing faculty of en- 
larged philosophy. He must combine in his 
mind the poAvers of the microscope and the 
telescope; be ready, like the steam-engine, at 
one time to twist a fibre, at another to propel 
an hundred-gun ship. Hence the rarity of 
eminence in this branch of knoAvledge ; and 
if we could conceive a writer who, to the ar- 
dent genius and descriptive poAvers of Gibbon, 
should unite the lucid glance and just discri- 
mination of Robertson, and the calm sense 
and reasoning powers of Hume, he would 
form a more perfect historian than ever has, 
or probably ever will appear upon earth. 

With all his generalizing powers, howeA'er, 
Robertson fell into one defect — or rather, he 
was unable, in one respect, to extricate him- 
self from the prejudices of his age and profes- 
sion. He Avas not a freethinker — on the con- 
trary, he Avas a sincere and pious divine ; but 
he lived in an age of freethinkers — they had 
the chief influence in the formation of a wri- 
ter's fame ; and he Avas too desirous of literary 
reputation to incur the hazard of ridicule or 
contempt, by assigning too prominent a place 
to the obnoxious topic. Thence he has as 
cribed far too little influence to Christianity, in 
restraining the ferocity of savage manners, 
preserving alive the remains of ancient knoAA r - 
ledge, and laying in general freedom the broad 
and deep foundations of European society. 
He has not overlooked these topics, but he has 
not given them their due place, nor assigned 
them their proper Aveight. He lived and died 
in comparative retirement; and he was never 
able to shake himself free from the prejudice* 
of his country and education, on the subject 
of Romish religion. Not that he exaggerated 
the abuses and enormities of the Roman Ca- 
tholic superstition which brought about the 
Reformation, nor the vast benefits Avhich Lu- 
ther conferred upon mankind by bringing them 
to light; both were so great, that they hardly 
admitted of exaggeration. His error — and, in 
the delineation of the progress of society in 
modern Europe, it was a very great one — con- 
sisted in overlooking the beneficial effect of 



GUIZOT. 



371 



that very superstition, then so pernicious, in a 
prior age of the world, when violence was uni- 
versal, crime prevalent alike in high and low 
places, and government impotent to check 
either the tyranny of the great or the madness 
of the people. Then it was that superstition 
was the greatest blessing which Providence, 
in mercy, could bestow on mankind; for it ef- 
fected what the wisdom of the learned or the 
efforts of the active were alike unable to effect; 
it restrained the violence by imaginary, which 
was inaccessible to the force of real, terrors ; 
and spread that protection under the shadow 
of the Cross, which could never have been ob- 
tained by the power of the sword. Robertson 
was wholly insensible to these early and in- 
estimable blessings of the Christian faith; he 
has admirably delineated the beneficial influ- 
ence of the Crusades upon subsequent society, 
but on this all-important topic he is silent. 
Yet, whoever has studied the condition of 
European society in the ninth, tenth, and ele- 
venth centuries, as it has since been developed 
in the admirable works of Sismondi, Thierry, 
Michelet, and Guizot, must be aware that the 
services, not merely of Christianity, but of the 
superstitions which had usurped its place, 
were, during that long period, incalculable ; 
and that, but for them, European society would 
infallibly have sunk, as Asiatic in every age 
has done, beneath the desolating sword of bar- 
barian power. 

Sismondi — if the magnitude, and in many 
respects the merit, of his works be considered 
— must be regarded as one of the greatest 
historians of modern times. His "History of 
the Italian Republics" in sixteen, of the "Mo- 
narchy of France" in thirty volumes, attest the 
variety and extent of his antiquarian researches, 
as well as the indefatigable industry of his 
pen: his "Literature of the South of Europe" 
in four, and "Miscellaneous Essays," in three 
volumes, show how happily he has blended 
these weighty investigations with the lighter 
topics ^of literature and poetry, and the politi- 
cal philosophy which, in recent times, has 
come to occupy so large a place in the study 
of all who have turned their mind to the pro- 
gress of human affairs. Nor is the least part 
of his merit to be found in the admirable skill 
with which he has condensed, each in two 
volumes, his great histories, for the benefit of 
that numerous class of readers, who unable or 
unwilling to face the formidable undertaking 
of going through his massy works, are de- 
sirous of obtaining such a brief summary of 
their leading events as may suffice for persons 
of ordinary perseverance or education. His 
mind was essentially philosophical ; and it is 
the philosophy of modern history, accordingly, 
which he has exerted himself so strenuously 
to unfold. He views society at a distance, and 
exhibits its great changes in their just propor- 
tions, and, in general, with their true effects. 
His success in this arduous undertaking has 
been great indeed. He has completed the pic- 
ture of which Robertson had only formed the 
sketch — and completed it with such a prodigi- 
ous collection of materials, and so lucid an ar- 
rangement of them in their appropriate places, 
as to have left future ages little to do but draw 



the just conclusions from the results of his 
labours. 

With all these merits, and they are great, 
and with this rare combination of antiquarian 
industry with philosophic generalization, Sis- 
mondi is far from being a perfect historian. 
He did well to abridge his great works ; for he 
will find few readers who will have persever- 
ance enough to go through them. An abridg- 
ment was tried of Gibbon; but it had little 
success, and has never since been attempted. 
You might as well publish an abridgment of 
Waverley or Ivanhoe. Every reader of the 
Decline and Fall must feel that condensation is 
impossible, without an omission of interest or 
a curtailment of beauty. Sismondi, with all 
his admirable qualities as a general and philo- 
sophic historian, wants the one thing needful 
in exciting interest — descriptive and dramatic 
power. He was a man of great vigour of 
thought and clearness of observation, but little 
genius — at least of that kind of genius which 
is necessary to move the feelings or warm the 
imagination. That was his principal defect ; 
and it will prevent his great works from ever 
commanding the attention of a numerous body 
of general readers, however much they may 
be esteemed by the learned and studious. 
Conscious of this deficiency, he makes scarce 
any attempt to make his narrative interesting; 
but, reserving his whole strength for general 
views on the progress of society, or philo- 
sophic observations on its most important 
changes, he fills up the intermediate space 
with long quotations from chronicles, me- 
moirs, and state papers — a sure way, if the 
selection is not made with great judgment, of 
rendering the whole insupportably tedious. 
Every narrative, to be interesting, should be 
given in the writer's own words, unless on those 
occasions, by no means frequent, when some 
striking or remarkable expressions of a speak- 
er, or contemporary writer, are to be preserved. 
Unity of style and expression is as indispen- 
sable in a history which is to move the heart, 
or fascinate the imagination, as in a tragedy, 
a painting, or an epic poem. 

But, in addition to this, Sismondi's general 
views, though ordinarily just, and always ex- 
pressed with clearness and precision, are not 
always to be taken without examination Like 
Robertson, he was never able to extricate him- 
self entirely from the early prejudices o»" his 
country and education ; hardly any of the Ge- 
neva school of philosophers have been able to 
do so. Brought up in that learned and able, 
but narrow, and in some respects bigoted com- 
munity, he was early engaged in the vast 
undertaking of the History of the Italian Re- 
publics. Thus, before he was well aware of 
it, and at a time of life, when the opinions are 
flexible, and easily moulded by external im- 
pressions, he became irrevocably enamoured 
of such little communities as he had lived in, 
or was describing, and imbibed all the preju- 
dices against the Church of Rome, which have 
naturally, from close proximity, and the en- 
durance of unutterable evils at its hands, been 
ever prevalent among the Calvinists of Ge- 
neva. These causes have tinged his otherwise 
impartial views with two signal prejudices. 



372 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



■which appear in all his writings where these 
subjects are even remotely alluded to. His 
partiality for municipal institutions, and the 
social system depending on them, is as extra- 
vagant, as his aversion to the Church of Rome 
is conspicuous and intemperate. His idea of 
a perfect society would be a confederacy of 
little republics, governed by popularly elected 
magistrates, holding the scarlet old lady of 
Rome in utter abomination, and governed 
in matters of religion by the Presbyterian 
forms, and the tenets of Calvin. It is not to 
be wondered at, that the annalist of the coun- 
tries of Tasso and Dante, of Titian and Ma- 
chiavel, of Petrarch and Leonardo da Vinci, 
of Galileo and Michael Angelo, should con- 
ceive, that in no other state of society is such 
scope afforded for mental cultivation and the 
development of the highest efforts of genius. 
Still less is it surprising, that the historian of 
the crusades against the Albigenses, of the un- 
heard of atrocities of Simon de Montfort, of 
the wholesale massacres, burnings, and tortur- 
ings, which have brought such indelible dis- 
grace on the Roman priesthood, should feel 
deeply interested in a faith which has extri- 
cated his own country from the abominable 
persecution. But still, this indulgence of these 
natural, and in some respects praiseworthy, 
feelings, has blinded Sismondi to the insur- 
mountable evils of a confederacy of small 
republics at this time, amidst surrounding, 
powerful, and monarchical states ; and to the 
inappreciable blessings of the Christian faith, 
and even of the Romish superstition, before 
the period when these infamous cruelties be- 
gan, when their warfare was only with the op- 
pressor, their struggles with the destroyers of 
the human race. 

But truth is great, and will prevail. Those 
just views of modern society, which neither 
the luminous eye of Robertson, nor the learned 
research and philosophic mind of Sismondi 
could reach, have been brought forward by a 
writer of surpassing ability, whose fame as 
an historian and a philosopher is for the time 
overshadowed by the more fleeting celebrity 
of the statesman and the politician. We will 
not speak of M. Guizot in the latter character, 
much as we are tempted to do so, by the high 
and honourable part which he has long borne 
in European diplomacy, and the signal ability 
with which, in the midst of a short-sighted and 
rebellious generation, clamouring, as the Ro- 
mans of old, for the mullis utile helium, he has 
sustained his sovereign's wise and magnani- 
mous resolution to maintain peace. We are 
too near the time to appreciate the magnitude 
of these blessings; men would not now be- 
lieve through what a crisis the British empire, 
unconscious of its danger, passed, when M. 
Thiers was dismissed, three years and a half 
ago, by Louis Philippe, and M. Guizot called 
to the helm. But when the time arrives, as 
arrive it will, that the diplomatic secrets of that 
period are brought to light; when the instruc- 
tions of the revolutionary minister to the ad- 
miral of the Toulon fleet are made known, and 
the marvellous chance which prevented their 
being acted upon by him, has become matter 
f)f history ; it will be admitted, that the civilized 



world have good cause to thank M. Guizot for 
saving it from acontest as vehement, as perilous, 
and probably as disastrous to all concerned, as 
that which followed the French Revolution. 

Our present business is with M. Guizot as an 
historian and a philosopher; a character in. 
which he will be remembered, long after his 
services to humanity as a statesman and a 
minister have ceased to attract the attention 
of men. In those respects, we place him in 
the very highest rank among the writers of 
modern Europe. It must be understood, how- 
ever, in what his greatness consists, lest the 
readers, expecting what they will not find, ex- 
perience disappointment, when they begin the 
study of his works. He is neither imaginative 
nor pictorial; he seldom aims at the pathetic, 
and has little eloquence. He is not a Livy nor 
a Gibbon. Nature has not given him either 
dramatic or descriptive powers. He is a man 
of the highest genius; but it consists not in 
narrating particular events, or describing in- 
dividual achievement. It is in the discovery 
of general causes; in tracing the operation 
of changes in society, which escape ordinary 
observation ; in seeing whence man has come, 
and whither he is going, that his greatness- 
consists ; and in that loftiest of the regions 
of history, he is unrivalled. We know of 
no author who has traced the changes of 
society, and the general causes which de- 
termine the fate of nations, with such just 
views and so much sagacious discrimination. 
He is not, properly speaking, an historian ; his 
vocation and object were different. He is a 
great discourser on history. If ever the philo- 
sophy of history was imbodied in a human 
being, it is in M. Guizot. 

The style of this great author is, in every 
respect, suited to his subject. He does not 
aim at the highest flights of fancy; makes no 
attempt to warm the soul or melt the feelings; 
is seldom imaginative, and never descriptive. 
But he is uniformly lucid, sagacious, and dis- 
criminating; deduces his conclusions with 
admirable clearness from his premises, and 
occasionally warms from the innate grandeur 
of his subject into aglow of fervent eloquence. 
He seems to treat of human affairs, as if he 
viewed them from a loftier sphere than other 
men; as if he were elevated above the usual 
struggles and contests of humanity; and a su- 
perior power had withdrawn the veil which 
shrouds their secret causes and course from 
the gaze of sublunary beings. He cares not 
to dive into the secrets of cabinets ; attaches 
little, perhaps too little, importance to indivi- 
dual character; but fixes his steady gaze on 
the great and lasting causes which, in a dur- 
able manner, influence human affairs. He 
views them not from year to year but from 
century to century; and, when considered in 
that view, it is astonishing how much the 
importance of individual agency disappears- 
Important in their generation — sometimes al- 
most omnipotent for good or for evil while 
they live — particular men, how great soever, 
rarety leave any very important consequences 
behind them; or at least rarely do what other 
men might not have done as effectually as 
them, and which was not already determined 



GUIZOT. 



373 



by the tendency of the human mint!, and the 
tide, either of flow or ebb, by which human 
affairs were at the time wafted to and fro. The 
desperate struggles of war or of ambition in 
which they were engaged, and in which so 
much genius and capacity were exerted, are 
swept over by the flood of time, and seldom 
leave any lasting trace behind. It is the men 
who determine the direction of this tide, who 
imprint their character on general thought, 
who are the real directors of human affairs; it 
is the giants of thought who, in the end, go- 
vern the world. Kings and ministers, princes 
and generals, warriors and legislators, are but 
the ministers of their blessings or their curses 
to mankind. But their dominion seldom begins 
till themselves are mouldering in their graves. 

Guizot's largest work, in point of size, is 
his translation of Gibbon's Rome; and the just 
and philosophic spirit in which he viewed the 
course of human affairs, was admirably cal- 
culated to provide an antidote to the skeptical 
sneers which, in a writer of such genius and 
strength of understanding, are at once the 
marvel and the disgrace of that immortal 
work. He has begun also a history of the 
English Revolution, to which he was led by 
having been the editor of a valuable collec- 
tion of Memoirs relating to the great Rebellion, 
translated into French, in twenty-five volumes. 
But this work only got the length of two vo- 
lumes, and came no further down than the 
death of Charles I., an epoch no further on in 
the English than the execution of Louis in the 
French Revolution. This history is clear, 
lucid, and valuable; but it is written with 
little eloquence, and has met with no great 
success : the author's powers were not of the 
dramatic or pictorial kind necessary to paint 
that dreadful story. These were editorial or 
industrial labours unworthy of Guizot's mind; 
it was when he delivered lectures from the 
chair of history in Paris, that his genius shone 
forth in its proper sphere and its true lustre. 

His Civilisation en France, in five volumes, 
Civilisation Europeenne, and Essais sur I'Hisloire 
dc France, each in one volume, are the fruits 
of these professional labours. The same pro- 
found thought, sagacious discrimination, and 
lucid view, are conspicuous in them all ; but 
they possess different degrees of interest to the 
English reader. The Civilisation en France is 
the groundwork of the whole, and it enters at 
large into the whole details, historical, legal, 
and antiquarian, essential for its illustration, 
and the proof of the various propositions 
which it contains. In the Civilisation Euro- 
peenne and Essays on the History of France, how- 
ever, the general results are given with equal 
clearness and greater brevity. We do not 
hesitate to say, that they appear to us to throw 
more light on the history of society in modern 
Europe, and the general progress of mankind, 
from the exertions of its inhabitants, than any 
other works in existence ; and it is of them, 
especially the first, that we propose to give our 
readers some account. 

The most important event which ever oc- 
curred in the history of mankind, is the one 
concerning which contemporary writers have 
given us the least satisfactory accounts. Be- 



yond all doubt the overthrow of Rome by the 
Goths was the most momentous catastrophe 
which has occurred on the earth since the de- 
luge ; yet, if we examine either the historians 
of antiquity or the earliest of modern times, 
we find it wholly impossible to understand to 
what cause so great a catastrophe had been 
owing. What gave, in the third and fourth 
centuries, so prodigious an impulse to the 
northern nations, and enabled them, after be- 
ing so long repelled by the arms of Rome, 
finally to prevail over it ? What, still more, 
so completely paralyzed the strength of the 
empire during that period, and produced that 
astonishing weakness in the ancient conque- 
rors of the world, which rendered them the 
easy prey of those whom they had so often 
subdued 1 The ancient writers content them- 
selves with saying, that the people became 
corrupted; that they lost their military cou- 
rage ; that the recruiting of the legions, in the 
free inhabitants of the empire, became im- 
possible; and that the semi-barbarous tribes 
on the frontier could not be relied on to up- 
hold its fortunes. But a very little reflection 
must be sufficient to show that there must 
have been much more in it than this, before a 
race of conquerors was converted into one of 
slaves ; before the legions fled before the bar- 
barians, and the strength of the civilized was 
overthrown by the energy of the savage world. 
For what prevented a revenue from being 
raised in the third or fourth, as well as the 
first or second centuries'? Corruption in its 
worst form had doubtless pervaded the higher 
ranks in Rome from the emperor downward; 
but these vices are the faults of the exalted 
and the affluent only; they never have, and 
never will, extend generally to the great body 
of the community; for this plain reason, that 
they are not rich enough to purchase them. 
But the remarkable thing is, that in the decline 
of the empire, it was in the lower ranks that 
the greatest and most fatal weakness first ap- 
peared. Long before the race of the Patri- 
cians had become extinct, the free cultivators 
had disappeared from the fields. Leaders and 
generals of the most consummate abilities, of 
the greatest daring, frequently arose ; but their 
efforts proved in the end ineffectual, from the 
impossibility of finding a sturdy race of fol- 
lowers to fill their ranks. The legionary Italian 
soldier was awanting — his place was imper- 
fectly supplied by the rude Dacian, the hardy 
German, the faithless Goth. So completely 
were the inhabitants of the provinces within 
the Rhine and the Danube paralyzed, that they 
ceased to make any resistance to the hordes 
of invaders ; and the fortunes of the empire 
were, for several generations, sustained solely 
by the heroic efforts of individual leaders — 
Belisarius, Narses, Julian, Aurelian, Constan- 
tine, and many others — whose renown, though 
it could not rouse the pacific inhabitants to 
warlike efforts, yet attracted military adven 
hirers from all parts of the world to theit 
standard. Now, what weakened and destroyed 
the rural population? It could not be luxury; 
on the contrary, they were suffering under 
excess of poverty, and bent down beneath a 
load of taxes, which, in Gaul, in the time of 
2 1 



374 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



Constantine, amounted, as Gibbon tells us, to 
nine pounds sterling on every freeman 1 What 
was it, then, which occasioned the depopula- 
tion and weakness 1 This is what behoves us 
to know — this it is which ancient history has 
left unknown. 

It is here that the vast step in the philosophy 
of history made from ancient to modern times 
is apparent. From a few detached hints and 
insulated facts, left by the ancient annalists, 
apparently ignorant of their value, and care- 
less of their preservation, modern industry, 
guided by the light of philosophy, has reared 
up the true solution of the difficulty, and re- 
vealed the real causes, hidden from the ordi- 
nary gaze, which, even in the midst of its 
greatest prosperity, gradually, but certainly, 
undermined the strength of the empire. Miche- 
let, in his Gaule sous ks Remains, a most able 
and interesting work — Thierry, in his Domina- 
tion Romainc en Gaule, and his His/oirc des Rois 
Merovingians — Sismondi, in the three first vo- 
lumes of his Histoirc des Franrais — and Guizot, 
in his Civilisation Europcemic, and the first vo- 
lumes of his Essais sur VHistoire dc France — 
have applied their great powers to this most in- 
teresting subject. It may safely be affirmed that 
they have got to the bottom of the subject, and 
lifted up the veil from one of the darkest, and 
yet most momentous, changes in the history of 
mankind. Guizot gives the following account 
of the principal causes which silently under- 
mined the strength of the empire, flowing from 
the peculiar organization of ancient society: — 

"When Rome extended, what did it do? 
Follow its history, and you will find that it 
was everlastingly engaged in conquering or 
founding cities. It was with cities that it 
fought — with cities that it contracted — into 
cities that it sent colonies. The history of the 
conquest of the world by Rome, is nothing but 
the history of the conquest and foundation of 
a great number of cities. In the east, the 
expansion of the Roman power assumed, from 
the very outset, a somewhat dissimilar cha- 
racter; the population was differently distri- 
buted from the west, and much less concen- 
trated in cities; but in the European world, 
the foundation or conquest of towns was the 
uniform result of Roman conquest. In Gaul 
and Spain, in Italy, it was constantly towns 
which opposed the barrier to Roman domi- 
nation, and towns which were founded or 
garrisoned by the legions, or strengthened by 
colonies, to retain them when vanquished in 
a state of subjection. Great roads stretched 
from one town to another ; the multitude of 
cross roads which now intersect each other in 
every direction, was unknown. They had no- 
thing in common with that multitude of little 
monuments, villages, churches, castles, villas, 
and cottages, which now cover our provinces. 
Rome has bequeathed to us nothing, either in 
its capital or its provinces, but the municipal 
character, which produced immense monuments 
on certain points, destined for the use of the 
vast population which was there assembled 
together. 

"From this peculiar conformation of society 
in Europe, under the Roman dominion, con- 
sisting of a vast conglomeration of cities, with 



each a dependent territory, all independent of 
each other, arose the absolute necessity for a 
central and absolute government. One muni- 
cipality in Rome might conquer the world : 
but to retain it in subjection, and provide for 
the government of all its multifarious parts, 
was a very different matter. This was one of 
the chief causes of the general adoption of a 
strong concentrated government under the em- 
pire. Such a centralized despotism not only 
succeeded in restraining and regulating all the 
incoherent members of the vast dominion, but 
the idea of a central irresistible authority in- 
sinuated itself into men's minds everywhere, 
at the same time, with wonderful facility. At 
first sight, one is astonished to see, in that 
prodigious and ill-united aggregate of little 
republics, in that accumulation of separate 
municipalities, spring up so suddenly an un- 
bounded respect for the sacred authority of 
the empire. But the truth is, it had become a 
matter of absolute necessity, that the bond 
which held together the different parts of this 
heterogeneous dominion should be very power- 
ful; and this it was which gave it so ready a 
reception in the minds of men. 

" But when the vigour of the central power 
declined during a course of ages, from the pres- 
sure of external warfare, and the weakness of 
internal corruption, this necessity was no 
longer felt. The capital ceased to be able to 
provide for the provinces ; it rather sought pro- 
tection from them. During four centuries, the 
central power of the emperors incessantly 
struggled against this increasing debility; but 
the moment at length arrived, when all the 
practised skill of despotism, over the long in- 
souciance of servitude, could no longer keep 
together the huge and unwieldy body. In the 
fourth century, we see it at once break up and 
disunite; the barbarians entered on all sides 
from without, the provinces ceased to oppose 
any resistance from within ; the cities to evince 
any regard for the general welfare ; and, as in 
the disaster of a shipwreck, every one looked 
out for his individual safety. Thus, on the 
dissolution of the empire, the same general 
state of society presented itself as in its cradle. 
The imperial authority sunk into the dust, and 
municipal institutions alone survived the dis- 
aster. This, then, was the chief legacy which 
the ancient bequeathed to the modern world — 
for it alone survived the storm by which the 
former had been destroyed — cities and a mu- 
nicipal organization everywhere established. 
But it was not the only legacy. Beside it, there 
was the recollection at least of the awful ma- 
jesty of the emperor — of a distant, unseen, but 
sacred and irresistible power. These are the 
two ideas which antiquity bequeathed to mo- 
dern times. On the one hand, the municipal 
regime, its rules, customs, and principles of 
liberty: on the other, a common, general, civil 
legislation; and the idea of absolute power, of 
a sacred majesty, the principle of order and 
servitude." — Civilisation Evropecnne, 20, 23. 

The causes which produced the extraordi- 
nary, and at first sight unaccountable, depopu- 
lation of the country districts, not only in Italy, 
but in Gaul, Spain, and all the European pro- 
vinces of the Roman empire, are explained by 



GUIZOT. 



375 



Guizot in his Essays on the History of France, 
and have been fully demonstrated by Sismondi, 
Thierry, and Michelet. They were a natural 
consequence of the municipal system, then 
universally established as the very basis of 
civilization in the whole Roman empire, and 
may be seen urging, from a similar cause, the 
Turkish empire to dissolution at this day. 
This was the imposition of a certain fixed 
duty, as a burden on each municipality, to be 
raised, indeed, by its own members, but admit- 
ting of no diminution, save under the most 
special circumstances, and on an express ex- 
emption by the emperor. Had the great bulk 
of the people been free, and the empire pros- 
perous, this fixity of impost would have been 
the greatest of all blessings. It is the precise 
boon so frequently and earnestly implored by 
our ryots in India, and indeed by the cultiva- 
tors all over the east. But when the empire 
was beset on all sides with enemies — only the 
more rapacious and pressing, that the might 
of the legions had so long confined them within 
the comparatively narrow limits of their own 
sterile territories — and disasters, frequent and 
serious, were laying waste the frontier pro- 
vinces, it became the most dreadful of all 
scourges; because, as the assessment on each 
district was fixed, and scarcely ever suffered 
any abatement, every disaster experienced 
increased the burden on the survivors who 
had escaped it ; until the}- became bent down 
under such a weight of taxation, as, coupled 
with the small number of freemen on whom it 
exclusively fell, crushed every attempt at pro- 
ductive industry. It was the same thing as if 
all the farmers on each estate were to be bound 
to make up, annually, the same amount of rent 
to their landlord, no matter how many of them 
had become insolvent. We know how long 
the agriculture of Britain, in a period of de- 
clining prices and frequent disaster, would 
exist under such a system. 

Add to this the necessary effect which the 
free circulation of grain throughout the whole 
Roman world had in depressing the agricul- 
ture of Italy, Gaul, and Greece. They were 
unable to withstand the competition of Egypt, 
Lybia, and Sicily — the store-houses of the 
world ; where the benignity of the climate, and 
the riches of the soil, rewarded seventy or an 
hundred-fold the labours of the husbandman. 
Gaul, where the increase was only seven-fold 
— Italy, where it seldom exceeded twelve — 
8pain. where it was never so high, were 
crushed in the struggle. The mistress of the 
world, as Tacitus bewails, had come to depend 
for her subsistence on the floods of the Nile. 
Unable to compete with the cheap grain raised 
in the more favoured regions of the south, the 
cultivators of Italy and Gaul gradually retired 
from the contest. They devoted their exten- 
sive estates to pasturage, because live cattle or 
dairy produce could not bear the expense of 
being shipped from Africa; and the race of 
agriculturists, the strength of the legions, dis- 
appeared in the fields, and was lost in the 
needy and indolent crowd of urban citizens, in 
part maintained by tributes in corn brought 
from Egypt and Lybia. This augmented the 
burdens upon those who remained in the rural 



districts ; for, as the taxes of each municipality 
remained the same, every one that withdrew 
into the towns left an additional burden on the 
shoulders of his brethren who remained behind. 
So powerful was the operation of these two 
causes — the fixity in the state burdens payable 
by each municipality, and the constantly de- 
clining prices, owing to the vast import from 
agricultural regions more favoured by nature 
— that it fully equalled the effect of the ravages 
of the barbarians in the frontier provinces 
exposed to their incursions ; and the depopula- 
tion of the rural districts was as complete in 
Italy and Gaul, before a barbarian had passed 
the Alps or set his foot across the Rhine, as in 
the plains between the Alps or the Adriatic and 
the Danube, which had for long been ravaged 
by their arms. 

Domestic slavery conspired with these evils 
to prevent the healing power of nature from 
closing these yawning wounds. Gibbon esti- 
mates the number of slaves throughout the 
empire, in its latter days, at a number equal to 
that of the freemen ; in other words, one half 
of the whole inhabitants were in a state of 
servitude ;* and as there were 120,000,000 souls 
under the Roman sway, sixty millions were in 
that degraded condition. There is reason to 
believe that the number of slaves was still 
greater than this estimate, and at least double 
that of the freemen ; for it is known by an 
authentic enumeration, that, in the time of the 
Emperor Claudius, the number of citizens in 
the empire was only 6,945,000 men, who, with 
their families, might amount to twenty millions 
of souls ; and the total number of freemen was 
about double that of the citizens.j In one 
family alone, in the time of Pliny, there were 
4116 slaves4 But take the number of slaves 
according to Gibbon's computation, at only 
half the entire population, what a prodigious 
abstraction must this multitude of slaves have 
made from the physical and moral strength of 
the empire! Half the people requiring food, 
needing restraint, incapable of trust, and yet 
adding nothing to the muster-roll of the legions, 
or the persons by whom the fixed and immov- 
able annual taxes were to be made good! In 
what state would the British empire now be, 
if we were subjected to the action of similar 
causes of ruin? A vast and unwieldy domi- 
nion, exposed on every side to the incursions 
of barbarous and hostile nations, daily increas- 
ing in numbers, and augmenting in military 
skill ; a fixed taxation, for which the whole 
free inhabitants of every municipality were 
jointly and severally responsible, to meet the 
increasing military establishment required by 
these perils ; a declining, and at length extinct, 
agriculture in the central provinces of the em- 
pire, owing to the deluge of cheap grain from 
its fertile extremities wafted over the waters 
of the Mediterranean; multitudes of turbulent 
freemen in cities, kept quiet by daily distribu- 
tion of provisions at the public expense, from 
the imperial granaries ; and a half, or two- 
thirds of the whole population in a state of 
slavery — neither bearing any share of the pub- 
lic burdens, nor adding to the strength of the 

* Gibbon. t Ibiti. t Plhi. Hist. Nat. xxziii. 4? 






376 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



military array of the empire. Such are the 
discoveries of modern philosophy, as to the 
causes of the decline and ultimate fall of the 
Roman empire, gleaned from a few facts, acci- 
dentally preserved by the ancient writers, ap- 
parently unconscious of their value ! It is a 
noble science which, in so short a time, has 
presented such a gift to mankind. 

Guizot has announced, and ably illustrated, 
a great truth, which, when traced to its legiti- 
mate consequences, will be found to go far 
towards dispelling many of the pernicious in- 
novating dogmas which have so long been 
afloat in the world. It is this, that whenever 
an institution, though apparently pernicious in 
our eyes, has long existed, and under a great 
variety of circumstances, we may rest assured 
that it in reality has been attended with some 
advantages which counterbalance its evils, and 
that upon the whole it is beneficial in its 
tendency. This important principle is thus 
stated : — 

" Independent of the efforts of man, there is 
established Iva law of providence, which it is 
impossible to mistake, and which is analogous 
to what we witness in the natural world, a 
certain measure of order, reason, and justice, 
without which society cannot exist. From the 
single fact of its endurance we may conclude, 
with certainty, that a society is not completely 
absurd, insensate, or iniquitous; that it is not 
destitute of the elements of reason, truth, and 
justice — which alone can give life to society. 
If the more that society developes itself, the 
stronger does this principle become — if it is 
daily accepted by a greater number of men, it 
is a certain proof that in the lapse of time 
there has been progressively introduced into 
it more reason, more justice, more right. It is 
thus that the idea of political legitimacy has 
arisen. 

"This principle has for its foundation, in 
the first instance, at least in a certain degree, 
the great principles of moral legitimacy — 
justice, reason, truth. Then came the sanction 
of time, which always begets the presumption 
of reason having directed arrangements which 
have long endured. In the early periods of 
society, we too often find force and falsehood 
ruling the cradles of royalty, aristocracy, de- 
mocracy, and even the church ; but every 
where you will see this force and falsehood 
yielding to the reforming hand of time, and 
right and truth taking their place in the rulers 
of civilization. It is this progressive infusion 
of right and truth which has by degrees de- 
veloped the idea of political legitimacy ; it is 
thus that it has become established in modern 
civilization. At different times, indeed, at- 
tempts have been made to substitute for this 
idea the banner of despotic power; but, in 
doing so, they have turned it aside from its 
true origin. It is so little the banner of des- 
potic power, that it is in the name of right 
and justice that it has overspread the world. 
As little is it exclusive: il belongs neither to 
persons, classes, nor sects; it arises wherever 
•the idea of right has developed itself. We 
shall meet with this principle in systems the 
mosi opposite : in the feudal system, in the 
municipalities of Flanders and Germany, in 



the republics of Italy, as well as in simple 
monarchies. It is a character diffused through 
the various elements of modern civilization, 
and the perception of which is indispensable 
to the right understanding of its history." — 
Lecture iii. 9, 1 1 ; Civilisation Europeenne. 

No principle ever was announced of more 
practical importance in legislating for man- 
kind, than is contained in this passage. The 
doctrine is somewhat obscurely stated, and 
not with the precision which in general dis- 
tinguishes the French writers; but the import 
of it seems to be this — That no system of go- 
vernment can long exist among men, unless it 
is substantially, and in the majority of cases, 
founded in reason and justice, and sanctioned 
by experienced utility for the people among 
whom it exists ; and therefore, that we may 
predicate with perfect certainty of any institu- 
tion which has been generally extended and 
long established, that it has been upon the 
whole beneficial, and should be modified or 
altered with a very cautious hand. That this 
proposition is true, will probably be disputed 
by none who have thought much and dis- 
passionately on human affairs; for all human 
institutions are formed and supported by men, 
and unless men had some reason for support- 
ing them, they would speedily sink to the 
ground. It is in vain to say a privileged class 
have got possession of the power, and they 
make use of it to perpetuate these abuses. 
Doubtless, they are always sufficiently inclined 
to do so ; but a privileged class, or a despot, is 
always a mere handful against the great body 
of the people; and unless their power is sup- 
ported by the force of general opinion, founded 
on experienced utility upon the whole, it could 
not maintain its ground a single week. And 
this explains a fact observed by an able and 
ingenious writer of the present day,* that if 
almost all the great convulsions recorded in 
history are attentively considered, it will be 
found, that after a brief period of strenuous, 
and often almost super-human effort, on the 
part of the people, they have terminated in the 
establishment of a government and institutions 
differing scarcely, except in name, from that 
which had preceded the struggle. It is hardly 
necessary to remark how striking a confirma- 
tion the English revolution of 1688, and the 
French of 1830, afford of this truth. 

And this explains what is the true meaning 
of, and solid foundation for, that reverence for 
antiquity which is so strongly implanted in hu- 
man nature, and is never forgotten for any con- 
siderable time without inducing the most dread- 
ful disasters upon society. It means that those 
institutions which have descended to us in actual 
practice from our ancestors, come sanctioned 
by the experience of ages ; and that they could 
not have stood so long a test unless they had 
been recommended, in some degree at least, 
by their utility. It is not that our ancestors 
were wiser than we are ; they were certainly 
less informed, and probably were, on that ac- 
count, in the general case, less judicious. But 
time has swept away their follies, which were 
doubtless great enough, as it has done the 

* Mr. James's Preface to Mary of Burgundy. 



GUIZOT. 



377 



worthless ephemeral literature with which they, 
as we, were overwhelmed; and nothing has 
stood the test of ages, and come down to us 
through a series of generations, of their ideas 
or institutions, but what had some utility in 
human feelings and necessities, and was on 
the whole expedient at the time when it arose. 
Its utility may have ceased by the change of 
manners or of the circumstances of society — 
that may be a good reason for cautiously 
modifying or altering it — but rely upon it, it 
was once useful, if it has existed long; and 
the presumption of present and continuing 
utility requires to be strongly outweighed by 
forcible considerations before it is abandoned. 
Lord Bacon has told us, in words which can 
never become trite, so profound is their wis- 
dom, that our changes, to be beneficial, should 
resemble those of time, which, though the 
greatest of all innovators, works out its altera- 
tions so gradually that they are never per- 
ceived. Guizot makes, in the same spirit, the 
following fine observation on the slow march 
of Supreme wisdom in the government of the 
world : — 

" If we turn our eyes to history, we shall 
find that all the great developments of the hu- 
man mind have turned to the advantage of 
society — all the great struggles of humanity 
to the good of mankind. It is not, indeed, im- 
mediately that these efforts take place ; ages 
often elapse, a thousand obstacles intervene, 
before the}- are fully developed ; but when we 
survey a long course of ages, we see that all 
has been accomplished. The march of Provi- 
dence is not subjected to narrow limits ; it 
cares not to develope to-day the consequences 
of a principle which it has established yester- 
day ; it will bring them forth in ages, when the 
appointed hour has arrived ; and its course is 
not the less sure that it is slow. The throne of 
the Almighty rests on time — it marches through 
its boundless expanse as the gods of Homer 
through space — it makes a step, and ages have 
passed away. How many centuries elapsed, 
how many changes ensued, before the regenera- 
tion of the inner man, by means of Christianity, 
exercised on the social state its great and 
salutary influence ! Nevertheless, it has at 
length succeeded. No one can mistake its 
effects at this time." — Lcctvrc i. 24. 

In surveying the progress of civilization in 
modern, as compared with ancient times, two 
features stand prominent as distinguishing the 
one from the other. These are the church and 
the feudal system. They were precisely the cir- 
cumstances which gave umbrage to the phi- 
losophers of the eighteenth century, and which 
awakened the greatest transports of indigna- 
tion among the ardent multitudes who, at its 
close, brought about the French Revolution. 
Very different is the light in which the eye of 
true philosophy, enlightened by the experi- 
ence of their abolition, views these great dis- 
tinctive features of modern society. 

"Immense," says Guizot, "was the influence 
which the Christian church exercised over the 
civilization of modern Europe. In the outset, 
it was an incalculable advantage to have a 
moral power, a power destitute of physical 
force, which reposed only on mental convic- 
43 



tions and moral feelings, established amidst 
that deluge of physical force and selfish vio- 
lence which overwhelmed society at that pe- 
riod. Had the Christian church not existed, 
the world would have been delivered over to 
the influence of physical strength, in its 
coarsest and most revolting form. It alone 
exercised a moral power. It did more; it 
spread abroad the idea of a rule of obedience, 
a heavenly power, to which all human beings, 
how great soever, were subjected, and which 
was above all human laws. That of itself was 
a safeguard against the greatest evils of society ; 
for it affected the minds of those by whom 
they were brought about; it professed that be- 
lief — the foundation of the salvation of hu- 
manity — that there is above all existing insti- 
tutions, superior to all human laws, a perma- 
nent and divine law, sometimes called Reason, 
sometimes Divine Command, but which, under 
whatever name it goes, is for ever the same. 

" Then the church commenced a great work 
— the separation of the spiritual and temporal 
power. That separation is the origin of li- 
berty of conscience; it rests on no other prin- 
ciple than that which lies at the bottom of the 
widest and most extended toleration. The se- 
paration of the spiritual and temporal power 
rests on the principle, that physical force is 
neither entitled to act, nor can ever have any 
lasting influence, on thoughts, conviction, truth ; 
it flows from the eternal distinction between 
the world of thought and the world of action, 
the world of interior conviction and that of 
external facts. In truth that principle of the 
liberty of conscience, for which Europe has 
combated and suffered so much, which has so 
slowly triumphed, and often against the ut- 
most efforts of the clergy themselves, was first 
founded by the doctrine of the separation of 
the temporal and spiritual power, in the cradle 
of European civilization. It is the Christian 
church which, by the necessities of its situa- 
tion to defend itself against the assaults of bar- 
barism, introduced and maintained it. The 
presence of a moral influence, the mainte- 
nance of a Divine law, the separation of the 
temporal and spiritual power, are the three 
great blessings which the Christian church has 
diffused in the dark ages over European so- 
ciety. 

" The influence of the Christian church was 
great and beneficent for another reason. The 
bishop and clergy ere long became the princi- 
pal municipal magistrates : they were the 
chancellors and ministers of kings — the rulers, 
except in the camp and the field, of mankind. 
When the Roman empire crumbled into dust, 
when the central power of the emperors and 
the legions disappeared, there remained, we 
have seen, no other authority in the state but 
the municipal functionaries. But they them- 
selves had fallen into a state of apathy and 
despair; the heavy burdens of despotism, the 
oppressive taxes of the municipalities, the in- 
cursions of the fierce barbarians, had reduced 
them to despair. No protection to society, m> 
revival of industry, no shielding of innocence, 
could be expected from their exertions. The 
clergy, again, formed a society within itself; 
fresh, young, vigorous, sheltered by the pre 
2i 2 



378 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



vailing faith, which speedily drew to itself all 
the learning and intellectual strength that re- 
mained in the state. The bishops and priests, 
full of life and of zeal, naturally were recurred 
to in order to fill all civil situations requiring 
thought or information. It is wrong to re- 
proach their exercise of these powers as an 
usurpation; they alone were capable of exer- 
cising them. Thus has the natural course of 
things prescribed for all ages and countries. 
The clergy alone were mentally strong and 
morally zealous : they became all-powerful. 
It is the law of the universe." — Lecture iii. 27, 
31 ; Civilisation Europeentie. 

Nothing can be more just or important than 
these observations ; and they thi"ow a new and 
consoling light on the progress and ultimate 
destiny of European society. They are as 
original as they are momentous. Robertson, 
with his honest horror of the innumerable cor- 
ruptions which, in the time of Leo X. and Lu- 
ther, brought about the Reformation — Sismon- 
di, with his natural detestation of a faith which 
had urged on the dreadful cruelties of the cru- 
sade of the Albigenses, and which produced 
the revocation of the edict of Nantes — have 
alike overlooked those important truths, so es- 
sential to a right understanding of the history 
of modern society. They saw that the arro- 
gance and cruelty of the Roman clergy had 
produced innumerable evils in later times ; 
that their venality in regard to indulgences 
and abuse of absolution had brought religion 
itself into discredit; that the absurd and in- 
credible tenets which they still attempted to 
force on mankind, had gone far to alienate the 
intellectual strength of modern Europe, during 
the last century, from their support. Seeing 
this, they condemned it absolutely, for all times 
and in all places. They fell into the usual 
error of men in reasoning on former from their 
own times. They could not make " the past 
and the future predominate over the present." 
They felt the absurdity of many of the legends 
which the devout Catholics received as un- 
doubted truths, and lhe) r saw no use in per- 
petuating the belief in them; and thence they 
conceived that they must always have been 
equally unserviceable, forgetting that the eigh- 
teenth was not the eighlh century; and that, 
during the dark ages, violence would have 
rioted without control, if, when reason was in 
abeyance, knowledge scanty, and military 
strength alone in estimation, superstition had 
not thrown its unseen fetters over the bar- 
barian's arms. They saw that the Romish 
clergy, during five centuries, had laboured 
strenuously, and often with the most frightful 
cruelty, to crush independence of thought in 
matters of faith, and chain the human mind to 
the tenets, often absurd and erroneous, of her 
Papal creed; and they forgot that, during five 
preceding centuries, the Christian church had 
laboured as assiduously to establish the inde- 
pendence of thought from physical coercion, 
and had alone kept alive, during the interreg- 
num of reason, the sparks of knowledge and 
the principles of freedom. 

In the same liberal and enlightened spirit 
Guizot views the feudal system, the next grand 
characteristic of modern times. 



"A decisive proof that, in the tenth century, 
the feudal system had become necessary, and 
was, in truth, the only social state possible, is 
to be found in the universality of its adoption. 
Universally, upon the cessation of barbarism, 
the feudal forms were adopted. At the first 
moment of barbarian conquest, men saw only 
the triumph of chaos. All unity, all general 
civilization disappeared ; on all sides was seen 
society falling into dissolution ; and, in its 
stead, arising a multitude of little, obscure, 
isolated communities. This appeared to all 
the contemporaries nothing short of universal 
anarchy. The poets, the chroniclers of the 
time, viewed it as the approach of the end of 
the world. It was, in truth, the end of the 
ancient world ; but the commencement of a 
new one, placed on a broad basis, and with 
large means of social improvement and indi- 
vidual happiness. 

"Then it was that the feudal system became 
necessary, inevitable. It was the only possi- 
ble means of emerging from the general chaos. 
The whole of Europe, accordingly, at the same 
time adopted it. Even those portions of so- 
ciety which were most strangers, apparently, 
to that system, entered warmly into its spirit, 
and were fain to share in its protection. The 
crown, the church, the communities, were con- 
strained to accommodate themselves to it. 
The churches became suzerain or vassal ; the 
burghs had their lords and their feuars ; the 
monasteries and abbeys had their feudal re- 
tainers, as well as the temporal barons. Roy- 
alty itself was disguised under the name of a 
feudal superior. Every thing was given in 
fief; not only lands, but certain rights flowing 
from them, as that of cutting wood, fisheries, 
or the like. The church made subinfeuda- 
tions of their casual revenues, as the dues on 
marriages, funerals, and baptisms." 

The establishment of the feudal system 
thus universally in Europe, produced one 
effect, the importance of which can hardly be 
exaggerated. Hitherto the mass of mankind 
had been collected under the municipal insti- 
tutions which had been universal in antiquity, 
in cities, or wandered in vagabond hordes 
through the country. Under the feudal system 
these men lived isolated, each in his own ha- 
bitation, at a great distance from each other. 
A glance will show that this single circum- 
stance must have exercised on the character 
of society, and the course of civilization, 
the social preponderance ; the government of 
society passed at once from the towns to the 
country — private took the lead of public pro- 
perty — private prevailed over public life. Such 
was the first effect, and it was an effect purely 
material, of the establishment of the feudal 
system. But other effects, still more material, 
followed, of a moral kind, which have exer- 
cised the most important effects on the Eu- 
ropean manners and mind. 

"The feudal proprietor established himself 
in an isolated place, which, for his own pro- 
tection, he rendered secure. He lived there, 
with his wife, his children, and a few faithful 
friends, who shared his hospitality, and con- 
tributed to his defence. Around the castle, in 
its vicinity, were established the fanners and 



GUIZOT. 



379 



serfs who cultivated his domain. In the midst 
of that inferior, hut yet allied and protected 
population, religion planted a church, and in- 
troduced a priest. He was usually the chap- 
lain of the castle, and at the same time the 
curate of the village ; in subsequent ages these 
two characters were separated ; the village 
pastor resided beside his church. This was 
the primitive feudal society — the cradle, as it 
were, of the European and Christian world. 

" From this state of things necessarily arose 
a prodigious superiority on the part of the pos- 
sessor of the fief, alike in his own eyes, and in 
the eyes of those who surrounded him. The 
feeling of individual importance, of personal 
freedom, was the ruling principle of savage 
life ; but here a new feeling was introduced — 
the importance of a proprietor, of the chief 
of a family, of a master, predominated over 
that of an individual. From this situation 
arose an immense feeling of superiority — a 
superiority peculiar to the feudal ages, and 
entirely different from any thing which had yet 
been experienced in the world. Like the feudal 
lord, the Roman patrician was the head of a 
family, a master, a landlord. He was, at the 
same time, a religious magistrate, a pontiff in 
the interior of his family. He was, moreover, 
a member of the municipality in which his 
property was situated, and perhaps one of 
the august senate, which, in name at least, still 
ruled the empire. But all this importance and 
dignity was derived from without — the patri- 
cian shared it with the other members of his 
municipality — with the corporation of which 
he formed a part. The importance of the 
feudal lord, again, was purely individual — he 
owed nothing to another; all the power he 
enjoyed emanated from himself alone. What 
a feeling of individual consequence must such 
a situation have inspired — what pride, what 
insolence, must it have engendered in his 
mind ! Above him was no superior, of whose 
orders he was to be the mere interpreter or 
organ — around him were no equals. No all- 
powerful municipality made his wishes bend 
to its own — no superior authority exercised a 
control over his wishes ; he knew no bridle on 
his inclinations, but the limits of his power, or 
the presence of danger. 

"Another consequence, hitherto not suffi- 
ciently attended to, but of vast importance, 
flowed from this society. 

"The patriarchal society, of which the Bible 
and the Oriental monuments offer the model, 
was the first combination of men. The chief 
of a tribe lived with his children, his relations, 
the different generations who have assembled 
around him. This was the situation of Abra- 
ham — of the patriarchs: it is still that of the 
Arab tribes which perpetuate their manners. 
The clan, of which remains still exist in the 
mountains of Scotland, and the sept of Ireland, 



is a modification of the patriarchal society : it 
is the family of the chief, expanded during a 
succession of generations, and forming a little 
aggregation of dependents, still influenced by 
the same attachments, and subjected to the 
same authority. But the feudal community 
was very different. Allied at first to the clan, 
it was yet in many essential particulars dissi- 
milar. There did not exist between its mem- 
bers the bond of relationship ; they were not 
of the same blood ; they often did not speak 
the same language. The feudal lord belonged 
to a foreign and conquering, his serfs to a do- 
mestic and vanquished race. Their employ- 
ments were as various as their feelings and 
their traditions. The lord lived in his castle, 
with his wife, his children, and relations : the 
serfs on the estate, of a different race, of dif- 
ferent names, toiled in the cottages around. 
This difference Avas prodigious — it exercised 
a most powerful effect on the domestic habits 
of modern Europe. It engendered the attach- 
ments of home : it brought women into their 
proper sphere in domestic life. The little so- 
ciety of freemen, who lived in the midst of an 
alien race in the castle, were all in all to each 
other. No forum or theatres were at hand, 
with their cares or their pleasures ; no city 
enjoyments were a counterpoise to the plea- 
sures of country life. War and the chase 
broke in, it is true, grievously at times, upon 
this scene of domestic peace. But war and 
the chase could not last for ever; and, in the 
long intervals of undisturbed repose, family 
attachments formed the chief solace of life. 
Thus it was that wotwex acquired their par- 
amount influence — thence the manners of chi- 
valry, and the gallantry of modern times; they 
were but an extension of the courtesy and 
habits of the castle. The word courtesy shows 
it — it was in the court of the castle that the 
habits it denotes were learned." — Lecture iv. 
13, 17; Civilisation Europrcnne. 

We have exhausted, perhaps, exceeded, our 
limits ; and we have only extracted a few of 
the most striking ideas from the first hundred 
pages of one of Guizot's works — ex uno disce 
omnes. The translation of Ihem has been an 
agreeable occupation for a few evenings ; but 
they awake one mournful impression — the 
voice which uttered so many noble and en- 
lightened sentiments is now silent; the genius 
which once cast abroad light on the history of 
man, is lost in the vortex of present politics. 
The philosopher, the historian, are merged in 
the statesman — the instructor of all in the go- 
vernor of one generation. Great as have been 
his services, brilliant his course in the new 
career into which he has been launched, it is 
as nothing compared to that which he has left, 
for the one confers present distinction, the 
other immortal fame. 



41 



380 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO.* 



There is something inexpressibly striking, 
it may almost be said awful, in the fame of 
Homer. Three thousand years have elapsed 
since the bard of Chios began to pour forth his 
strains ; and their reputation, so far from de- 
clining, is on the increase. Successive na- 
tions are employed in celebrating his works; 
generation after generation of men are fasci- 
nated by his imagination. Discrepancies of 
race, of character, of institutions, of religion, 
of age, of the world, are forgotten in the com- 
mon worship of his genius. In this universal 
tribute of gratitude, modern Europe vies with 
remote antiquity, the light Frenchman with the 
volatile Greek, the impassioned Italian with the 
enthusiastic German, the sturdy Englishman 
with the unconquerable Koman, the aspiring 
Russian with the proud American. Seven 
cities, in ancient times, competed for the hon- 
our of having given him birth, but seventy na- 
tions have since been moulded by his produc- 
tions. He gave a mythology to the ancients ; 
he has given the fine arts to the modern world. 
Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Juno, are still house- 
hold words in every tongue ; Vulcan is yet the 
god of fire, Neptune of the ocean, Venus of 
love. When Michael Angelo and Canova 
strove to imbody their conceptions of heroism 
or beauty, they portrayed the heroes of the 
Iliad. Flaxman's genius was elevated to the 
highest point in imbodying its events. Epic 
poets, in subsequent times, have done little 
more than imitate his machinery, copy his 
characters, adopt his similes, and, in a few in- 
stances, improve upon his descriptions. Paint- 
ing and statuary, for two thousand years, have 
been employed in striving to portray, by the 
pencil or the chisel, his yet breathing concep- 
tions. Language and thought itself have been 
moulded by the influence of his poetry. Images 
of wrath are still taken from Achilles, of pride 
from Agamemnon, of astuteness from Ulysses, 
of patriotism from Hector, of tenderness from 
Andromache, of age from Nestor. The gal- 
leys of Rome were, the line-of-battle ships of 
France and England still are, called after his 
heroes. The Agamemnon long bore the flag 
of Nelson; the Ajax perished by the flames 
within sight of the tomb of the Telamonian 
hero, on the shores of the Hellespont ; the 
Achilles was blown up at the battle of Trafal- 
gar. Alexander the Great ran round the tomb 
of Achilles before undertaking the conquest of 
Asia. It was the boast of Napoleon that his 
mother reclined on tapestry representing the 
heroes of the Iliad, when he was brought into 
the world. The greatest poets of ancient and 
modern times have spent their lives in the study 
of his genius or the imitation of his works. 
Withdraw from subsequent poetry the images, 
mythology, and characters of the Iliad, and 

♦ Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1845. 



what would remain? Petrarch spent his best 
years in restoring his verses. Tasso portrayed 
the siege of Jerusalem, and the shock of Eu- 
rope and Asia, almost exactly as Homer had 
done the contest of the same forces, on the 
same shores, two thousand five hundred years 
before. Milton's old age, when blind and poor, 
was solaced by hearing the verses recited of 
the poet, to whose conceptions his own mighty 
spirit had been so much indebted ; and Pope 
deemed himself fortunate in devoting his life 
to the translation of the Iliad. 

No writer in modern times has equalled the 
wide-spread fame of the Grecian bard; but it 
may be doubted whether, in the realms of 
thought, and in sway over the reflecting world, 
the influence of Dante has not been almost 
as considerable. Little more than five hundred 
years, indeed, have elapsed — not a sixth of the 
thirty centuries which have tested the strength 
of the Grecian patriarch — since the immortal 
Florentine poured forth his divine conceptions; 
but yet there is scarcely a writer of eminence 
since that time, in works even bordering on 
imagination, in which traces of his genius are 
not to be found. The Inferno has penetrated 
the world. If images of horror are sought 
after, it is to his works that all the subsequent 
ages have turned ; if those of love and divine 
felicity are desired, all turn to the Paradise and 
the Spirit of Beatrice. When the historians of 
the French Revolution wished to convey an 
idea of the utmost agonies they were called on 
to portray, they contented themselves with say- 
ing it equalled all that the imagination of Dante 
had conceived of the terrible. Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds has exerted his highest genius in depict- 
ing the frightful scene described by him, when 
Ugolino perished of hunger in the tower of 
Pisa. Alfieri, Metastasio, Corneille, Lope de 
Vega, and all the great masters of the tragic 
muse, have sought in his works the germs of 
their finest conceptions. The first of these 
tragedians marked two-thirds of the Inferno and 
Paradiso as worthy of being committed to me- 
mory. Modern novelists have found in his 
prolific mind the storehouse from which they 
have drawn their noblest imagery, the chord by 
which to strike the profoundest feelings of the 
human heart. Eighty editions of his poems 
have been published in Europe within the last 
half century ; and the public admiration, so 
far from being satiated, is augmenting. Every 
scholar knows how largely Milton was indebted 
to his poems for many of his most powerful 
images. Byron inherited, though often at 
second hand, his mantle, in many of his most 
moving conceptions. Schiller has imbodied 
them in a noble historic mirror ; and the dreams 
of Goethe reveal the secret influence of the 
terrible imagination which portrayed the deep 
remorse and hopeless agonies of Malebolge. 

Michael Angelo has exercised an influence 



HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO. 



381 



on modern art, little, if at all, inferior to that 
produced on the realms of thought by Homel- 
and Dante. The father of Italian painting, the 
author of the frescoes on the Sistine Chapel, 
he was, at the same time, the restorer of an- 
cient sculpture, and the intrepid architect who 
placed the Pantheon in the air. Raphael con- 
fessed, that he owed to the contemplation of 
his works his most elevated conceptions of 
their divine art. Sculpture, under his original 
hand, started from the slumber of a thousand 
years, in all the freshness of youthful vigour; 
architecture, in subsequent times, has sought 
in vain to equal, and can never hope to sur- 
pass, his immortal monument in the matchless 
dome of St. Peter's. He found painting in its 
infancy — he left it arrived at absolute perfec- 
tion. He first demonstrated of what that no- 
ble art is capable. In the Last Judgment he 
revealed its wonderful powers, exhibiting, as it 
were, at one view, the whole circles of Dante's 
Inferno — portraying with terrible fidelity the 
agonies of the wicked, when the last trumpet 
shall tear the veil from their faces, and exhibit 
in undisguised truth that most fearful of spec- 
tacles — a naked human heart. Casting aside, 
perhaps with undue contempt, the adventitious 
aid derived from finishing, colouring, and exe- 
cution, he threw the whole force of his genius 
into the design, the expression of the features, 
the drawing of the figures. There never was 
such a delineator of bone and muscle as 
Michael Angelo. His frescoes stand out in 
bold relief from the walls of the Vatican, like 
the sculptures of Phidias from the pediment 
of the Parthenon. He was the founder of the 
school of painting both at Rome and Florence 
— that great school which, disdaining the re- 
presentation of still life, and all the subordinate 
appliances of the art, devoted itself to the re- 
presentation of the grand and the beautiful ; to 
the expression of passion in all its vehemence 
— of emotion in all its intensity. His incom- 
parable delineation of bones and muscles was 
but a means to an end ; it was the human 
heart, the throes of human passion, that his 
master-hand laid bare. Raphael congratulated 
himself, and thanked God that he had given 
him life in the same age with that painter ; and 
Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his last address to the 
Academy, " reflected, not without vanity, that 
his Discourses bore testimony to his admira- 
tion of that truly divine man, and desired that 
the last words he pronounced in that academy, 
and from that chair, might be the name of 
Michael Angelo."* 

The fame of these illustrious men has long 
been placed beyond the reach of cavil. Criti- 
cism cannot reach, envy cannot detract from, 
emulation cannot equal them. Great present 
celebrity, indeed, is no guarantee for future 
and enduring fame; in many cases, it is the 
reverse ; but there is a wide difference between 
the judgment of the present and that of future 
ages. The favour of the great, the passions 
of the multitude, the efforts of reviewers, the 
interest of booksellers, a clique of authors, a 
coterie of ladies, accidental events, degrading 
propensities, often enter largely into the com- 

* Reynolds's Discourses, No. 16, adfinem. 



position of present reputation. But opinibn is 
freed from all these disturbing influences by 
the lapse of time. The grave is the greatest 
of all purifiers. Literary jealousy, interested 
partiality, vulgar applause, exclusive favour, 
alike disappear before the hand of death. We 
never can be sufficiently distrustful of present 
opinion, so largely is it directed by passion or 
interest. But Ave may rely with confidence on 
the judgment of successive generations on de- 
parted eminence ; for it is detached from the 
chief cause of present aberration. So various 
are the prejudices, so contradictory the par- 
tialities and predilections of men, in different 
countries and ages of the world, that they 
never can concur through a course of cen- 
turies in one opinion, if it is not founded in 
truth and justice. The voxpopuli is often little 
more than the vox diaboli ; but the voice of 
ages is the voice of God. 

It is of more moment to consider in what 
the greatness of these illustrious men really 
consists — to what it has probably been owing 
— and in what particulars they bear an an- 
alogy to each other. 

They are all three distinguished by one pe- 
culiarity, which doubtless entered largely into 
their transcendent merit — they wrote in the 
infancy of civilization. Homer, as all the 
world knows, is the oldest profane author in 
existence. Dante flourished about the year 
1300: he lived at a time when the English 
barons lived in rooms strewed with rushes, and 
few of them could sign their names. The 
long life of Michael Angelo, extending from 
1474 to 1564, over ninety years, if not passed 
in the infancy of civilization, was at least 
passed in the childhood of the arts : before his 
time, painting was in its cradle. Cimabue had 
merely unfolded the first dawn of beauty at 
Florence; and the stiff figures of Pietro Peru- 
gino, which may be traced in the first works 
of his pupil Raphael, still attest the backward 
state of the arts at Rome. This peculiarity, 
applicable alike to all these three great men, 
is very remarkable, and beyond all question 
had a powerful iufluence,both in forming their 
peculiar character, and elevating them to the 
astonishing greatness which they speedily at- 
tained. 

It gave them — what Johnson has justly 
termed the first requisite to human greatness 
— self-confidence. They were the first — at least 
the first known to themselves and their con- 
temporaries — who adventured on their several 
arts ; and thus they proceeded fearlessly in their 
great career. They bad neither critics to fear, 
nor lords to flatter, nor former excellence to 
imitate. They portrayed with the pencil, or 
in verse, what they severally felt, undisturbed 
by fear, unswayed by example, unsolicitous 
about fame, unconscious of excellence. They 
did so for the first time. Thence the freshness 
and originality, the vigour and truth, the sim- 
plicity and raciness by which they are dis- 
tinguished. Shakspeare owed much of his 
greatness to the same cause ; and thence his 
similarity, in many respects, to these great 
masters of his own or the sister arts. When 
Pope asked Bentley what he thought of his 
translation of the Iliad, the scholar replied. 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



"You have written a pretty book, Mr. Pope; 
but you must not call it Homer." Bentley was 
right. With all its pomp of language and 
melody of versification, its richness of imagery 
and magnificence of diction, Pope's Homer is 
widely different from the original. He could 
not avoid it. Your " awful simplicity of the 
Grecian bard, his artless grandeur and unaf- 
fected majesty," will be sought for in vain in 
the translation ; but if they had appeared there, 
it would have been unreadable in that age. 
Michael Angelo, in his bold conceptions, ener- 
getic will, and rapid execution, bears a close 
resemblance to the father of poetry. In both, 
the same faults, as we esteem them, are con- 
spicuous, arising from a loo close imitation 
of nature, and a carelessness in rejecting im- 
ages or objects which are of an ordinary or 
homely description. Dante was incomparably 
more learned than either: he followed Virgil 
in his descent to the infernal regions ; and ex- 
hibits an intimate acquaintance with ancient 
history, as well as that of the modern Italian 
states, in the account of the characters he 
meets in that scene of torment. But in his 
own line he was entirely original. Homer and 
Virgil had, in episodes of their poems, intro- 
duced a picture of the infernal regions; but 
nothing on the plan of Dante's Inferno had be- 
fore been thought of in the world. With much 
of the machinery of the ancients, it bears the 
stamp of the spiritual faith of modern times. 
It lays bare the heart in a way unknown even 
to Homer and Euripides. It reveals the in- 
most man in a way which bespeaks the centu- 
ries of self-reflection in the cloister which had 
preceded it. It is the basis of all the spiritual 
poetry of modern, as the Iliad is of all the ex- 
ternal imagery of ancient, times. 

In this respect there is a most grievous im- 
pediment to genius in later, or, as we term 
them, more civilized times, from which, in 
earlier ages, it is wholly exempt. Criticism, 
public opinion, the dread of ridicule — then too 
often crush the strongest minds. The weight 
of former examples, the influence of early 
habits, the halo of long-established reputation, 
force original genius from the untrodden path 
of invention into the beaten one of imitation. 
Early talent feels itself overawed by the colos- 
sus which all the world adores ; it falls down 
and worships, instead of conceiving. The dread 
of ridicule extinguishes originality in its birth. 
Immense is the incubus thus laid upon the 
efforts of genius. It is the chief cause of the 
degradation of taste, the artificial style, the 
want of original conception, by which the 
literature of old nations is invariably dis- 
tinguished. The early poet or painter who 
portrays what he feels or has seen, with no 
anxiety but to do so powerfully and truly, is 
relieved of a load which crushes his subse- 
quent compeers to the earth. Mediocrity is 
ever envious of genius — ordinary capacity of 
original thought. Such envy in early times is 
innocuous or does not exist, at least to the ex- 
tent which is felt as so baneful in subsequent 
periods. But in a refined and enlightened 
age, its influence becomes incalculable. Who- 
ever strikes out a new region of thought or 
composition, whoever opens a fresh vein of im- 



agery or excellence, is persecuted by the cri- 
tics. He disturbs settled ideas, endangers es- 
tablished reputation, brings forward rivals to 
dominant fame. That is sufficient to render 
him the enemy of all the existing rulers in the 
world of taste. Even Jeffrey seriously la- 
mented, in one of his first reviews of Scott's 
poems, that he should have identified himself 
with the unpicturesque and expiring images of 
feudality, which no effort could render poeti- 
cal. Racine's tragedies were received with 
such a storm of criticism as wellnigh cost the 
sensitive author his life; and Rousseau was 
so rudely handled by contemporary writers on 
his first appearance, that it confirmed him in 
his morbid hatred of civilization. The vigour 
of these great men, indeed, overcame the ob- 
stacles created by contemporary envy ; but 
how seldom, especially in a refined age, can 
genius effect such a prodigy 1 how often is it 
crushed in the outset of its career, or turned 
aside into the humble and unobtrusive path of 
imitation, to shun the danger with which that 
of originality is beset! 

Milton's Paradise Lost contains many more 
lines of poetic beauty than Homer's Iliad; and 
there is nothing in the latter poem of equal 
length, which will bear any comparison with 
the exquisite picture of the primeval innocence 
of our First Parents in his fourth book. Never- 
theless, the Iliad is a more interesting poem 
than the Paradise Lost ; and has produced and 
will produce a much more extensive impres- 
sion on mankind. The reason is, that it is 
much fuller of event, is more varied, is more 
filled with images familiar to all mankind, and 
is less lost in metaphysical or philosophical 
abstractions. Homer, though the father of 
poets, was essentially dramatic ; he was an 
incomparable painter ; and it is his dramatic 
scenes, the moving panorama of his pictures, 
which fascinates the world. He often speaks 
to the heart, and is admirable in the delinea- 
tion of character; but he is so, not by convey- 
ing the inward feeling, but by painting with 
matchless fidelity its external symptoms, or 
putting into the mouths of his characters the 
precise words they would have used in similar 
circumstances in real life. Even his immortal 
parting of Hector and Andromache is no ex- 
ception to this remark; he paints the scene at 
the Seaman gate exactly as it would have oc- 
curred in nature, and moves us as if we had 
seen the Trojan hero taking off his helmet to 
assuage the terrors of his infant son, and heard 
the lamentations of his mother at parting with 
her husband. But he does not lay bare the 
heart, with the terrible force of Dante, by a line 
or a word. There is nothing in Homer which 
conveys so piercing an idea of misery as the 
line in the Inferno, where the Florentine bard 
assigns the reason of the lamentations of the 
spirits in Malebolge — 

" Questi non hanno speranza di morte." 
"These have not the hope of death." There 
speaks the spiritual poet; he does not paint 
to the eye, he does not even convey character 
by the words he makes them utter; he pierces, 
by a single expression, at once to the heart. 

Milton strove to raise earth to heaven ; Ho- 
mer brought down hqaven to earth. The latter 



HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO. 



383 



attempt was a much easier one than the for- 
mer; it was more consonant to human frailty; 
and, therefore, it has met with more success. 
The gods and goddesses in the Iliad are men 
and women, endowed with human passions, 
affections, and desires, and distinguished only 
from sublunary beings by superior power and 
the gift of immortality. We are interested in 
them as we are in the genii or magicians of 
an eastern romance. There is a sort of aerial 
epic poem going on between earth and heaven. 
They take sides in the terrestrial combat, and 
engage in the actual strife with the heroes en- 
gaged in it. Mars and Venus were wounded 
by Diomede when combatting in the Trojan 
ranks : their blood, or rather the 

"Ichor which blest immortals shed," 
flowed profusely; they fled howling to the pa- 
laces of heaven. Enlightened by a spiritual 
faith, fraught with sublime ideas of the divine 
nature and government, Milton was incompa- 
rably more just in his descriptions of the Su- 
preme Being, and more elevated in his picture 
of the angels and archangels who carried on 
the strife in heaven ; but he frequently falls 
into metaphysical abstractions or theological 
controversies, which detract from the interest 
of his poem. 

Despite Milton's own opinion, the concurring 
voice of all subsequent ages and countries 
has assigned to the Parudise Regained a much 
lower place than to the Paradise Lost. The 
reason is, that it is less dramatic — it has less 
incident and action. Great part of the poem 
is but an abstract theological debate between 
our Saviour and Satan. The speeches he 
makes them utter are admirable, the reasoning 
is close, the arguments cogent, the sentiments 
elevated in the speakers, but dialectic too. In 
many of the speeches of the angel Raphael, 
and in the council of heaven, in the Paradise 
Lost, there is too much of that species of dis- 
cussion for a poem which is to interest the 
generality of men. Dryden says, that Satan is 
Milton's real hero ; and every reader of the 
Paradise Lost must have felt, that in the Prince 
of Darkness and Adam and Eve, the interest 
of the poem consists. The reason is, that the 
vices of the first, and the weakness of the two 
last, bring them nearer than any other charac- 
ters in the poem to the standard of mortality ; 
and we are so constituted, that we cannot take 
any great interest but in persons who share in 
our failings. 

Perhaps the greatest cause of the sustained 
interest of the Iliad is the continued and vehe- 
ment action which is maintained. The atten- 
tion is seldom allowed to flag. Either in the 
council of the gods, the assembly of the Gre- 
cian or Trojan chiefs, or the contest of the 
leaders on the field of battle, an incessant in- 
terest is maintained. Great events are always 
on the wing; the issue of the contest is per- 
petually hanging, often almost even, in the 
balance. It is the art with which this is done, 
and a state of anxious suspense, like the crisis 
of a great battle, kept up, that the great art of 
the poet consists. It is done by making the 
whole dramatic — bringing the characters for- 
ward constantly to speak for themselves, mak- 
ing the events succeed each other with almost 



breathless rapidity, and balancing success al- 
ternately from one side to the other, without let- 
ting it ever incline decisively to either. Tasso 
has adopted the same plan in his Jerusalem 
Delivered, and the contests of ihe Christian 
knights and Saracen leaders with the lance 
and the sword, closely resemble those of the 
Grecian and Trojan chiefs on the plain of 
Troy. Ariosto has carried it still further. 
The exploits of his Paladins — their adventures 
on earth, in air, and water; their loves, their 
sufferings, their victories, their dangers — keep 
the reader in a continual state of suspense. It is 
this sustained and varied interest which makes 
so many readers prefer the Orlando Furioso to 
the Jerusalem Delivered. But Ariosto has pushed 
it too far. In the search of variety, he has 
lost sight of unity. His heroes are not con- 
gregated round the banners of two rival po- 
tentates : there is no one object or interest in 
his poem. No narrow plain, like that watered 
by the Scamauder, is the theatre of their ex- 
ploits. Jupiter, from the summit of Garga- 
rus, could not have beheld the contending 
armies. The most ardent imagination, indeed, 
is satiated with his adventures, but the closest 
attention can hardly follow their thread. Story 
after story is told, the exploits of knight after 
knight are recounted, till the mind is fatigued, 
the memory perplexed, and all general interest 
in the poem lost. 

Milton has admirably preserved the unity of 
his poem ; the grand and all-important object 
of the fall of man could hardly admit of subor- 
dinate or rival interests. But the great defect 
in the Paradise Lost, arising from that very- 
unity, is want of variety. It is strong through- 
out on too lofty a key; it does not come down 
sufficiently to the wants and cravings of mor- 
tality. The mind is awe-struck by the de- 
scription of Satan careering through the im- 
mensity of space, of the battle of the angels, 
of the fall of Lucifer, of the suffering, and yet 
unsubdued spirit of his fellow rebels, of the 
adamantine gates, and pitchy darkness, and 
burning lake of hell. But after the first feel- 
ing of surprise and admiration is over, it is 
felt by all, that these lofty contemplations are 
not interesting to mortals like ourselves. They 
are too much above real life — too much out of 
the sphere of ordinary event and interest. 

The fourth book is the real scene of interest 
in the Paradise Lost ; it is its ravishing scenes 
of primeval innocence and bliss which have 
given it immortality. We are never tired of 
recurring to the bower of Eve, to her devotion 
to Adam, to the exquisite scenes of Paradise, 
its woods, its waters, its flowers, its enchant- 
ments. We are so, because we feel that it 
paints the Elysium to which all aspire, which 
all have for a brief period felt, but Avhich none 
in this world can durably enjoy. 

No one can doubt that Homer was endowed 
with the true poetic spirit, and yet there is 
very little of what we now call poetry in his 
writings. There is neither sentiment nor de- 
clamation — painting nor reflection. He is 
neither descriptive nor didactic. With great 
powers for portraying nature, as the exquisite 
choice of his epithets, and the occasional force 
of his similes prove, he never makes any la- 



381 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



boured attempt to delineate her features. He 
had the eye of a great painter ; but his pictorial 
talents are employed, almost unconsciously, 
in the fervour of narrating events, or the ani- 
mation of giving utterance to thoughts. He 
painted by an epithet or a line. Even the 
celebrated description of the fires in the plain 
of Troy, likened to the moon in a serene night, 
is contained in seven lines. His rosy-fingered 
morn — cloud-compelling Jupiter — Neptune, 
stiller of the waves — Aurora rising from her 
crocus-bed — Night drawing her veil over the 
heavens — the black keel careering through the 
lashing waves — the shout of the far-sounding 
sea — and the like, from which subsequent poets 
and dramatists have borrowed so largely, are 
all brief allusions, or epithets, which evidently 
did not form the main object of his strains. 
He was a close observer of nature — its lights, 
its shades, its storms and calms, its animals, 
their migrations, their cries and habits; but he 
never suspends his narrative to describe them. 
We shall look in vain in the Iliad, and even 
the Odyssey, for the lengthened pictures of 
scenery which are so frequent in Virgil and 
Tasso, and appear in such rich profusion in 
Milton. He describes storms only as objects 
of terror, not to paint them to the eye. Such 
things are to be found in the book of Job and 
in the Psalms, but with the same brevity and 
magical force of emphatic expression. There 
never was a greater painter of nature than Ho- 
mer ; there never was a man who aimed less 
at being so. 

The portraying of character and event was 
the great and evident object of the Grecian 
bard; and there his powers may almost be 
pronounced unrivalled. He never tells you, 
unless it is sometimes to be inferred from an 
epithet, what the man's character that he in- 
troduces is. He trusts to the character to 
delineate itself. He lets us get acquainted 
with his heroes, as we do with persons around 
us, by hearing them speak, and seeing them 
act. In preserving character, in this dramatic 
way of representing it, he is unrivalled. He 
does not tell you that Nestor had the garrulity 
of age, and loved to recur to the events of his 
youth ; but he never makes him open his 
mouth without descanting on the adventures of 
his early years, and the degenerate race of 
mortals who have succeeded the paladins of 
former days. He does not tell us that Achilles 
was wrathful and impetuous; but every time 
he speaks, the anger of the son of Peleus 
comes boiling over his lips. He does not 
describe Agamemnon as overbearing and 
haughty; but the pride of the king of men is 
continually appearing in his words and actions, 
and it is the evident moral of the Iliad to rep- 
resent its pernicious effects on the affairs of 
the Helenic confederacy. Ulysses never utters 
a word in which the cautious and prudent 
counsellor, sagacious in design but prompt in 
execution, wary in the council but decided in 
the field, far-seeing but yet persevering, is not 
apparent. Diomede never falters; alike in the 
field and the council he is indomitable. When 
Hector was careering in his chariot round 
their fortifications, and the king of men coun- 
selled retreat, he declared he would remain, were 



it only with Sthenelus and his friends. So 
completely marked, so well defined are his 
characters, though they were all rapacious 
chiefs at first sight, little differing from each 
other, that it has been observed with truth, that 
one well acquainted with the Iliad could tell, 
upon hearing one of the speeches read out 
without a name, who was the chief who 
uttered it. 

The two authors, since his time, who have 
most nearly approached him in this respect, 
are Shakspeare and Scott. Both seem to have 
received the pencil which paints the human 
heart from nature herself. Both had a keen 
and searching eye for character in all grades 
and walks of life ; and what is a general ac- 
companiment of such a disposition, a strong 
sense of the ridiculous. Both seized the salient 
points in mental disposition, and perceived at 
a glance, as it were, the ruling propensity. 
Both impressed this character so strongly on 
their minds, that they threw themselves, as it 
were, into the very souls of the persons whom 
they delineated, and made them speak and act 
like nature herself. It is this extraordinary 
faculty of identifying themselves with their 
characters, and bringing out of their mouth the 
very words which, in real life, would have 
come, which constitutes the chief and perma- 
nent attraction of these wonderful masters of 
the human heart. Cervantes had it in an 
equal degree ; and thence it is that Homer, 
Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Scott, have made 
so great, and to all appearance, durable im- 
pression on mankind. The human heart is, 
at bottom, everywhere the same. There is 
infinite diversity in the dress he wears, but the 
naked human figure of one country scarcely 
differs from another. The writers who have 
succeeded in reaching this deep substratum, 
this far-hidden but common source of human 
action, are understood and admired over all tha 
world. It is the same on the banks of tha 
Simoi's as on those of the Avon — on the Sierra 
Morena as the Scottish hills. They are under- 
stood alike in Europe as Asia — in antiquity a? 
modern times; one unanimous burst of admi- 
ration salutes them from the North Cape to 
Cape Horn — from the age of Pisistratus to tha? 
of Napoleon. 

Strange as it may appear to superficial ob 
servers, Cervantes bears a close analogy, in 
many particulars, to Homer. Circumstances, 
and an inherent turn for humour, made hirt 
throw his genius into an exquisite ridicule of 
the manners of chivalry ; but the author of 
Don Quixote had in him the spirit of a grea/ 
epic poet. His lesser pieces prove it; une- 
quivocal traces of it are to be found in th* 
adventures of the Knight of La Mancha him 
self. The elevation of mind which, amidst al? 
his aberrations, appears in that erratic cha- 
racter; the incomparable traits of nature with 
which the work abounds; the faculty of de- 
scribing events in the most striking way ; of 
painting scenes in a few words; of delineating 
characters with graphic fidelity, and keeping 
them up with perfect consistency, which arc 
so conspicuous in Don Quixote, are so many 
of the most essential qualities of an epic poet 
Nor was the ardour of imagination, tha 



HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO. 



385 



romantic disposition, the brilliancy of fancy, 
the lofty aspirations, the tender heart, which 
form the more elevated and not less essential 
part of such a character, wanting in the Span- 
ish novelist. 

Sir Walter Scott more nearly resembles 
Homer than any poet who has sung since the 
siege of Troy. Not that he has produced any 
poem which will for a moment bear a com- 
parison with the Jliad — fine as the Lady of the 
Luke and Mar'mion are, it would be the height 
of national partiality to make any such com- 
parison. But, nevertheless, Sir Walter's mind 
is of the same dimensions as that of Homer. 
We see in him the same combination of 
natural sagacity with acquired information; 
of pictorial eye with dramatic effect; of observa- 
tion of character with reflection and feeling; 
of graphic power with poetic fervour; of 
ardour of imagination with rectitude of prin- 
ciple ; of warlike enthusiasm with pacific ten- 
derness, which have rendered the Grecian bard 
immortal. It is in his novels, however, more 
than his poetry, that this resemblance appears ; 
the author of Wavcrley more nearly approaches 
the blind bard than the author of the Lay. His 
Romances in verse contain some passages 
which are sublime, many which are beautiful, 
some pathetic. They are all interesting, and 
written in the same easy, careless style, inter- 
spersed with the most homely and grotesque 
expressions, which is so well known to all the 
readers of the Iliad. The battle in Marmion is 
beyond all question, as Jeffrey long ago 
remarked, the most Homeric strife which has 
been sung since the days of Homer. But these 
passages are few and far between; his poems 
are filled with numerous and long interludes, 
written with little art, and apparently no other 
object but to fill up the pages or eke out the 
story. It is in prose that the robust strength, 
the powerful arm, the profound knowledge of 
the heart, appear; and it is there, accordingly, 
that he approaches at times so closely to 
Homer. If we could conceive a poem in 
which the storming of Front-de-Boeuf's castle 
in Ivanhoc — the death of Fergus in Waverley — 
the storm on the coast, and death-scene in the 
fisher's hut, in the Antiquary — the devoted love 
in the Bride of Lam mer moor — the fervour of the 
Covenanters in Old. Mortality, and the combats 
of Richard and Saladin in the Talisman, were 
united together and intermingled with the in- 
comparable characters, descriptions, and inci- 
dents with which these novels abound, they 
would form an epic poem. 

Doubts have sometimes been expressed, as 
to whether the Iliad and Odyssey are all the 
production of one man. Never, perhaps, was 
doubt not merely so ill-founded, but so decisive- 
ly disproved by internal evidence. If ever in 
human composition the traces of one mind are 
conspicuous, they are in Homer. His beauties 
equally with his defects, his variety and uni- 
formity attest this. Never was an author who 
had so fertile an imagination for varying of in- 
cidents; never was one who expressed them 
in language in which the same words so con- 
stantly recur. This is the invariable charac- 
teristic of a great and powerful, but at the 
same time self-confident but careless mind. 
49 



It is to be seen in the most remarkable manner 
in Bacon and Machiavel, and not a little of it 
may be traced both in the prose and poetical 
works of Scott. The reason is, that the strength 
of the mind is thrown into the thought as the 
main object; the language, as a subordinate 
matter, is little considered. Expressions ca- 
pable of energetically expressing the prevail- 
ing ideas of imagination are early formed; 
but, when this is done, the powerful, careless 
mind, readily adopts them on all future occa- 
sions where they are at all applicable. There 
is scarcely a great and original thinker in 
whose writings the same expressions do not 
very frequently recur, often in exactly the same 
words. How much this is the case with Homer 
— with how much discrimination and genius 
his epithets and expressions were first chosen, 
and how frequently he repeats them, almost in 
every page, need be told to none who are ac- 
quainted with his writings. That is the most 
decisive mark at once of genius and identity. 
Original thinkers fall into repetition of expres- 
sion, because they are always speaking from 
one model — their own thoughts. Subordinate 
writers avoid this fault, because they are 
speaking from the thoughts of others, and 
share their variety. It requires as great an 
effort for the first to introduce difference of ex- 
pression as for the last to reach diversity of 
thought. 

The reader of Dante must not look for the 
heart-stirring and animated narrative — the con- 
stant interest — the breathless suspense, which 
hurries us along the rapid current of the Iliad. 
There are no councils of the gods ; no messen- 
gers winging their way through the clouds ; no 
combats of chiefs ; no cities to storm ; no fields 
to win. It is the infernal regions which the 
poet, under the guidance of his great leader, 
Virgil, visits; it is the scene of righteous re- 
tribution through which he is led : it is the ap- 
portionment of punishment and reward to 
crime or virtue, in this upper world, that he is 
doomed to witness. We enter the city of la- 
mentation — we look down the depths of the 
bottomless pit — we stand at the edge of the 
burning lake. His survey is not the mere tran- 
sient visit like that of Ulysses in Homer, or of 
JGneas in Virgil. He is taken slowly and de- 
liberately through every successive circle of 
Malebolge; descending down which, like the 
visitor of the tiers of vaults, one beneath 
another, in a feudal castle, he finds every spe- 
cies of malefactors, from the chiefs and kings 
whose heroic lives were stained only by a few 
deeds of cruelty, to the depraved malefactors 
whose base course was unrelieved by one ray 
of virtue. In the very conception of such a 
poem, is to be found decisive evidence of 
the mighty change which the human mind had 
undergone since the expiring lays of poetry 
were last heard in the ancient world; of the 
vast revolution of thought and inward convic- 
tion which, during a thousand years, in the 
solitude of the monastery, and under the sway 
of a spiritual faith, had taken place in the 
human heart. A gay and poetic mythology 
no longer amazed the world by its fictions, 
or charmed it by its imagery. Religion no 
longer basked in the sunshine of imagination. 
2K 



386 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



The awful words of judgment to come had 
been spoken ; and, like Felix, mankind had 
trembled. Ridiculous legends had ceased to 
be associated with the shades below — their 
place had been taken by images of horror. 
Conscience had resumed its place in the direc- 
tion of thought. Superstition had lent its awful 
power to the sanctions of religion. Terror of 
future punishment had subdued the fiercest 
passions — internal agony tamed the proudest 
spirits. It was the picture of a future world — 
of a worldof retribution — conceived under such 
impressions, that Dante proposed to give ; it is 
that which he has given with such terrible fidelity. 
Melancholy was the prevailing characteris- 
tic of the great Italian's mind. It was so pro- 
found that it penetrated all his thoughts ; so 
intense that it pervaded all his conceptions. 
Occasionally bright and beautiful ideas flitted 
across his imagination ; visions of bliss, ex- 
perienced for a moment, and then lost for ever, 
as if to render more profound the darkness by 
which they are surrounded. They are given 
with exquisite beauty; but they shine amidst 
the gloom like sunbeams struggling through 
the clouds. He inherited from the dark ages 
the austerity of the cloister; but he inherited 
with it the deep feelings and sublime concep- 
tions which its seclusion had generated. His 
mind was a world within itself. He drew all 
his conceptions from that inexhaustible source; 
but he drew them forth so clear and lucid, that 
they emerged, imbodied as it were, in living 
images. His characters are emblematic of 
the various passions and views for which dif- 
ferent degrees of punishment were reserved 
in the world to come ; but his conception of 
them was so distinct, his description so vivid, 
that they stand forth to our gaze in all the agony 
of their sufferings, like real flesh and blood. 
We see them — we feel them — we hear their 
cries — our very flesh creeps at the perception 
of their sufferings. We stand on the edge of 
the lake of boiling pitch — we feel the weight 
of the leaden mantles — we see the snow-like 
flakes of burning sand — we hear the cries of 
those who had lost the last earthly consolations, 
the hope of death : — 

" Quivi sospiri, pianti ed alti guai 
Risonavati per 1' aer senza stelle, 
Perch' io al cominciar ne lacrimal. 

Diverse lingue, orribili favelle, 
Parole didolore, accenti d' ira, 
Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle, 

Facevano un tiinmlto, il qual s' aggira 
Sempre 'n quell' aria senza tempo tinta 
Come la rena quando '1 turbo spira. 

* * * * 

Ed io : maestro, che e tanto greve 
A lor che lamentar li fa si forte 1 
Itispose : dicerolti molto breve. 
Questi non hanno speranza di morte." 

Inferno, c. iii. 
"Here sighs, with lamentations and loud moans, 
Resounded through the air pierced by no star, 
That e'en I wept at entering. Various tongues, 
Horrible languages, outcries of wo, 
Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse. 
With hands together smote that swell'd the sounds. 
Made up a tumult, that for ever whirls 
Round through that air with solid darkness stained, 
Like to the sand that in the whirlwind riii-s. 
* * * * * 

I then : Master! What doth aggrieve them thus, 
That they lament so loud ? He straight replied : 
That will I tell thee briefly. These of death 
No hope may entertain." 

Gary's Dante, Inferno, c. iii. 



Here is Dante portrayed to the life in the 
very outset. What a collection of awful images 
in a few lines ! Loud lamentations, hideous 
cries, mingled with the sound of clasped hands, 
beneath a starless sky ; and the terrible an- 
swer, as the cause of this suffering, " These 
have not the hope of death." 

The very first lines of the Inferno, when the 
gates of Hell were approached, and the in- 
scription over them appeared, paint the dis- 
mal character of the poem, and yet mingled 
with the sense of divine love and justice with 
which the author was penetrated. 

"Per me si va nella citta dolente ; 
Per me si va nell' eterno dolore ; 
Per me si va tra la perduta gente : 

Giustizia mosse '1 mio alto Fattore ; 
Fecenii la divina Potestate, 
La somma Sapienza e '1 primo Amore. 

Dinanzi a me non fur cose create, 
Se non eterne ; ed io eterno duro : 
Lasciate ogni speranza voi che 'ntrate." 

Inferno, c. iii. 

"Through me you pass into the city of wo; 
Through me you pass into eternal pain : 
Through me among the people lost for aye. 
Justice the founder of my fabric moved : 
To rear me was the task of power divine, 
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. 
Before me things create were none, save things 
Eternal, and eternal I endure. 
All hope abandon, ye who enter here." 

Gary's Dante, Inferno, c. iii. 

Dante had much more profound feelings 
than Homer, and therefore he has painted deep 
mysteries of the human heart with greater 
force and fidelity. The more advanced age of 
the world, the influence of a spiritual faith, the 
awful anticipation of judgment to come, the 
inmost feelings which, during long centuries 
of seclusion, had been drawn forth in the 
cloister, the protracted sufferings of the dark 
ages, had laid bare the human heart. Its suf- 
ferings, its terrors, its hopes, its joys, had be- 
come as household words. The Italian poet 
shared, as all do, in the ideas and images of his 
age, and to these he added many which were 
entirely his own. He painted the inward man, 
and painted him from his own feelings, not the 
observation of others. That is the grand dis- 
tinction between him and Homer; and that it 
is which has given him, in the delineation of 
mind, his great superiority. The Grecian bard 
was an incomparable observer; he had an in- 
exhaustible imagination for fiction, as well as 
a graphic eye for the delineation of real life ; 
but he had not a deep or feeling heart. He did 
not know it, like Dante and Shakspeare, from 
his own suffering. He painted the external 
symptoms of passion and emotion with the 
hand of a master ; but he did not reach the 
inward spring of feeling. He lets us into his 
characters by their speeches, their gestures, 
their actions, and keeps up their consistency 
with admirable fidelity; but he does not, by a 
word, an expression, or an epithet, admit us 
into the inmost folds of the heart. None can 
do so but such as themselves feel warmly and 
profoundly, and paint passion, emotion, or 
suffering, from their own experience, not the 
observation of others. Dante has acquired 
his colossal fame from the matchless force with 
which he has portrayed the wildest passions, 
the deepest feelings, the most intense suffer- 
ings of the heart. He is the refuge of aril 



HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO. 



387 



those who labour and are heavy laden — of all 
who feel profoundly or have suffered deeply. 
His verses are in the mouth of all who are 
torn by passion, gnawed by remorse, or tor- 
mented by apprehension; and how many are 
they in this scene of wo ! 

A distinguished modern critic* has said, 
that he who would now become a great poet 
must first become a little child. There is no 
doubt he is right. The seen and unseen fetters 
of civilization; the multitude of old ideas afloat 
in the world; the innumerable worn out chan- 
nels into which new ones are ever apt to flow; 
the general clamour with which critics, nursed 
amidst such fetters, receive any attempts at 
breaking them; the prevalence, in a wealthy 
and highly civilized age, of worldly or selfish 
ideas; the common approximation of charac- 
ters by perpetual intercourse, as of coins, by 
continual rubbing in passing from man to man, 
have taken away all freshness and originality 
from ideas. The learned, the polished, the 
highly educated, can hardly escape the fetters 
which former greatness throws over the soul. 
Milton could not avoid them ; half the images 
in his poems are taken from Homer, Virgil, 
and Dante ; and who dare hope for emancipa- 
tion when Milton was enthralled 1 The me- 
chanical arts increase in perfection as society 
advances. Science ever takes its renewed 
flights from the platform which former efforts 
have erected. Industry, guided by experience, 
in successive ages, brings to the highest point 
all the contrivances and inventions which mi- 
nister to the comfort or elegancies of life. But 
it is otherwise with genius. It sinks in the 
progress of society, as much as science and 
the arts rise. The country of Homer and 
^Eschylus sank for a thousand years into the 
torpor of the Byzantine empire. Originality 
perishes amidst acquisition. Freshness of 
conception is its life: like the flame, it burns 
fierce and clear in the first gales of a pure 
atmosphere; but languishes and dies in that 
polluted by many breaths. 

It was the resurrection of the human mind, 
after the seclusion and solitary reflection of 
the middle ages/which gave this vein of ori- 
ginal ideas to Dante, as their first wakening 
had given to Homer. Thought was not ex- 
tinct; the human mind was not dormant dur- 
ing the dark ages ; far from it — it never, in 
some respects, was more active. It was the 
first collision of their deep and lonely medita- 
tions with the works of the great ancient, 
poets, which occasioned the prodigy. Uni- 
versally it will be found to be the same. After 
the first flights of genius have been taken, it is 
by the collision of subsequent thought with it 
that the divine spark is again elicited. The 
meeting of two great minds is necessary to 
beget fresh ideas, as that of two clouds is to 
bring forth lightning, or the collision of flint 
and steel to produce fire. Johnson said he 
could not get new ideas till he had read. He 
was right; though it is not one in a thousand 
v/ho strikes out original thoughts from study- 
ing the works of others. The great sage did 
not read to imbibe the opinion of others, but 

* Macaulay. 



to engender new ones for himself; he did not 
study to imitate, but to create. It was the 
same with Dante ; it is the same with every 
really great man. His was the first powerful 
and original mind which, fraught with the 
profound and gloomy ideas nourished in seclu- 
sion during the middle ages, came into contact 
with the brilliant imagery, touching pathos, 
and harmonious language of the ancients. 
Hence his astonishing greatness. He almost 
worshipped Virgil, he speaks of him as a spe- 
cies of god; he mentions Homer as the first 
of poets. But he did not copy either the one 
or the other ; he scarcely imitated them. He 
strove to rival their brevity and beauty of ex- 
pression; but he did so in giving vent to new 
ideas, in painting new images, in awakening 
new emotions. The Inferno is as original as 
the Iliad; incomparably more so than the 
JEneid. The offspring of originality with ori- 
ginality is a new and noble creation ; of origi- 
nality with mediocrity, a spurious and degraded 
imitation. 

Dante paints the spirit of all the generations 
of men, each in their circle undergoing their 
allotted punishment; expiating by suffering 
the sins of an upper world. Virgil gave a 
glimpse, as it were, into that scene of retribu- 
tion ; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judg- 
ment on the successive spirits brought before 
them ; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Si- 
syphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnaw- 
ing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, 
the descent into the infernal regions was a 
brief episode ; with Dante it was the whole 
poem. Immense was the effort of imagina- 
tion requisite to give variety to such a subject, 
to prevent the mind from experiencing weari- 
ness amidst the eternal recurrence of crime 
and punishment. But the genius of Dante 
was equal to the task. His fancy was prodi- 
gious; his invention boundless; his imagina- 
tion inexhaustible. Fenced in, as he was, 
within narrow and gloomy limits by the nature 
of his subject, his creative spirit equals that 
of Homer himself. He has given birth to as 
many new ideas in the Inferno and the Paradiso, 
as the Grecian bard in the Iliad and Odyssey. 

Though he had reflected so much and so 
deeply on the human heart, and was so perfect 
a master of all the anatomy of mental suffer- 
ing, Dante's mind was essentially descriptive. 
He was a great painter as well as a profound 
thinker; he clothed deep feeling in the garb 
of the senses; he conceived a vast brood of 
new ideas, he arrayed them in a surprising 
manner in flesh and blood. He is ever clear 
and definite, at least in the Inferno. He ex- 
hibits in every canto of that wonderful poem a 
fresh image, but it is a clear one, of horror or 
anguish, which leaves nothing to the imagina- 
tion to add or conceive. His ideal characters 
are real persons; they are present to our 
senses ; we feel their flesh, see the quivering 
of their limbs, hear their lamentations, and 
feel a thrill of joy at their felicity. In the 
Paradiso he is more vague and general, and 
thence its acknowledged inferiority to the 
Inferno. But the images of horror are much 
more powerful than those of happiness, and it 
is they which have entranced the world. "It 



338 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



is easier," says Madame de Stae'l, "to convey 
ideas of suffering than those of happiness; for 
the former are too well known to every heart, 
the latter only to a few." 

The melancholy tone which pervades Dante's 
writings was doubtless, in a great measure, 
owing to the misfortunes of his life; and to 
them we are also indebted for many of the 
most caustic and powerful of his verses — per- 
haps for the design of the Inferno itself. He 
took vengeance on the generation which had 
persecuted and exiled him, by exhibiting its 
leaders suffering in the torments of hell. In 
his long seclusion, chiefly in the monastery 
of Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana, a wild and 
solitary retreat in the territory of Gubbio, and 
in a tower belonging to the Conte Falcucci, in 
the same district, his immortal work was writ- 
ten. The mortifications he underwent during 
this long and dismal exile are thus described 
by himself : — " Wandering over almost every 
part in which our language extends, I have 
gone about like a mendicant ; showing against 
my will the wound with which fortune has 
smitten me, and which is often falsely imputed 
to the demerit of him by whom it is endured. 
I have been, indeed, a vessel without sail or 
steerage, carried about to divers ports, and 
roads, and shores, by the dry wind that springs 
out of sad poverty." 

In the third circle of hell, Dante sees those 
who are punished by the plague of burning 
sand falling perpetually on them. Their tor- 
ments are thus described — 

" Supin giaceva in terra alcuna gente ; 
Alcuna si sedea tutta raccolta ; 
Ed altra andava continuamente. 

Quella che giva intorno era phi molta; 
E quella men che giaceva al tormento; 
Ma piu al duolo avea la lingua sciolta. 

Sovra tutto '1 sabbion d'un cader lento 
Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde, 
Come di neve in alpe senza vento. 

Quali Alessandro in quelle parti calde 
D* India vide sovra lo suo stuolo 
Fiamme cadere infino a terra salde." 

Inferno, c. xiv. 

" Of naked spirits many a flock I saw, 
All weeping piteously, to different laws 
Subjected : for on earth some lay supine, 
Some crouching close were seated, others paced 
Incessantly around ; the latter tribe 
More numerous, those fewer who beneath 
The torment lay, but louder in their grief. 

O'er all the sand fell slowly wafting down 
Dilated flakes of fire, as flakes of snow 
On Alpine summit, when the wind is hush'd. 
As, in the torrid Indian clime, the son 
Of Amnion saw, upon his warrior band 
Descending, solid flames, that to the ground 
Came down." 

Cary's Dante, c. xiv. 

The first appearance of Malebolge is de- 
scribed in these striking lines — 

"Luogo e in Inferno, detto Malebolge, 
Tutto di pictra e di color ferriirno. 
Come le cerchia che d' intorno il volge. 

Nel dritto mezzo del campo maligno 
Vanecgia un pozzo assai larco e profondo, 
Di cui suo luogo contera 1' ordigno. 

Quel cinghio die rimane adunque e tondo 
Tra '1 pozzo e '1 pie dell' alta ripa dura, 
E ha disiinto in dieci valli ul fondo." 

Inferno, c. xviii. 

"There is a place within the depths of hell 
Call'd Malebolge. all of rock dark-stained 
With hue ferruginous, e'en as the steep 
That round it circling winds. Right in the midst 
Of that abominable region yawns 
A spacious gulf profound, whereof the frame 



Due time shall tell. The circle, that remains, 
Throughout its round, between the gulf and base 
Of the higfi craggy banks, successive forms 
Ten bastions, in its hollow bottom raised." 

Cary's Dante, c. xviii. 

This is the outward appearance of Malebolge, 
the worst place of punishment in hell. It had 
many frightful abysses ; what follows is the 
picture of the first: — 

" Ristemmo per veder Paltra fessura 
Di Malebolge e gli altri pianti vani : 
E vidila mirabilmente oscura. 

Quale nell' arzana de' Veneziani 
Bolle 1' inverno la tenace pece, 
A rimpalmar li legni lor non sani— 

* * * * 
Tal non per fuoco ma per divina arte, 
Bollia laggiuso una pegola spessa. 

Che 'nviscava la ripa d'ogni parte. 
I' vedea lei, ma non vedeva in essa 
Ma che le bolle che '1 bollor levava, 

E gonfiar tutta e riseder compressa. 

* * * * 
E vidi dietro a noi un diavol ncro 
Correndo su per lo scoglio venire. 

Ahi quant' egli era nell' aspetto fiero! 
E quanto mi parea nell' atto acerbo, 
Con P ali aperte e sovre i pie leggiero! 

1/ ornero suo ch' era acuto e superbo 
Carcava un peccator con amlin l'anche, 
Ed ei tenea de' pie ghermito il nerbo. 

* * * * 
Laggiu il butto e per lo scojilio duro 

Si volse, e mai non fu mastino'sciolto 
Co tanta fretta a seguitar lo furo. 

Queis' attufiu e torno su convolto; 
Ma i demon che del ponte avean coverchio 
Gridar : qui non ha luojjo il Santo Volto. 

Qui si nuota altramenti che nel Sercbio 
Per6 se tu non vuoi de' nostri grafli, 
Non far sovra le pegola sovercbio. 

Poi 1' addentar con piu di cento rafli, 
Disser : coverto convien che qui balli, 
Si che se puoi nascosamente accaffi." 

Inferno, c. xxl. 

" To the summit reaching, stood 

To view another gap, within the round 
Of Malebolge, other bootless pangs. 

Marvellous darkness shadow'd o'er the place. 

In the Venetians' arsenal as boils 
Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear 
Their unsound vessels in the wintry clime. 

* * * * 
So, not by force of tire but art divine, 

Boil'd here a glutinous thick mass, that round 
Lined all the shore beneath. I that beheld, 
But therein not distinguished, save the bubbles 
Raised by the boiling, and one mighty swell 
Heave, and by turns subsiding fall. 

* * * * 
Behind me I beheld a devil black, 

That running up, advanced along the rock. 
Ah ! what fierce cruelty his look bespake. 
In act how bitter did he seem, with wings 
Buoyant outstretched, and feet of nimblest tread. 
His shoulder, proudly eminent and sharp, 
Was with a sinner charged ; by either haunch 
He held him, the foot's sinew griping fast. 

« ' * * * 

Him dashing down, o'er the rough rock he lurn'd; 
Nor ever after thief a mastiff loosed 
Sped with like eager haste. That other sank, 
And forthwith writhing to the surface rose. 
But those dark demons, shrouded by the bridge, 
Cried — Here the hallow'd visase saves not : here 
Is other swimming than in Serchio's wave, 
Wherefore, if thou desire we rend thee not, 
Take heed thou mount not o'er the pitch. This said, 
They grappled him with more than hundred hooks, 
And shouted— Cover'd thou must sport thee here ; 
So, if thou canst, in secret mayst thou filch." 

Cary's Dante, c. xxi. 

Fraught as his imagination was with gloomy 
ideas, with images of horror, it is the fidelity 
of his descriptions, the minute reality of his 
pictures, which gives them their terrible power. 
He knew well what it is that penetrates the 
soul. His images of horror in the infernal 
regions were all founded on those familiar to 



HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO. 



389' 



every one in the upper world ; it was from 
the caldron of boiling pitch in the arsenal of 
Venice that he took his idea of one of the pits 
of Malebolge. But what a picture docs he 
there exhibit ! The writhing sinner plunged 
headlong into the boiling waves, rising to the 
surface, and a hundred demons, mocking his 
sufferings, and with outstretched hooks tear- 
ing his flesh till he dived again beneath the 
liquid fire! It is the reality of the scene, the 
images familiar yet magnified in horror, which 
constitutes its power: we stand by; our flesh 
creeps as it would at witnessing an auto-da-fe 
of Castile, or on beholding a victim perishing 
under the knout in Russia. 

Michael Angelo was, in one sense, the 
painter of the Old Testament, as his bold and 
aspiring genius aimed rather at delineating 
the events of warfare, passion, or suffering, 
chronicled in the records of the Jews, than 
the scenes of love, affection, and benevolence, 
depicted in the gospels. But his mind was 
not formed merely on the events recorded in 
antiquity: it is no world doubtful of the im- 
mortality of the soul which he depicts. He is 
rather the personification in painting of the 
soul of Dante. His imagination was evident- 
ly fraught with the conceptions of the Inferno. 
The expression of mind beams forth in all his 
works. Vehement passion, stern resolve, un- 
daunted valour, sainted devotion, infant inno- 
cence, alternately occupied his pencil. It is 
hard to say in which he was greatest. In all 
his works we see marks of the genius of an- 
tiquity meeting the might of modern times: 
the imagery of mythology blended with the 
aspirations of Christianity. We see it in the 
dome of St. Peter's, we see it in the statue of 
Moses. Grecian sculpture was the realization 
in form of the conceptions of Homer; Italian 
painting the representation on canvas of the 
revelations of the gospel, which Dante clothed 
in the garb of poetry. Future ages should 
ever strive to equal, but can never hope to 
excel them. 

Never did artist work with more persever- 
ing vigour than Michael Angelo. He himself 
said that he laboured harder for fame, than 
ever poor artist did for bread. Born of a no- 
ble family, the heir to considerable posses- 
sions, he took to the arts from his earliest 
years from enthusiastic passion and conscious 
power. During a long life of ninety years, he 
prosecuted them with the ardent zeal of youth. 
He was consumed by the thirst for fame, the 
desire of great achievements, the invariable 
mark of heroic minds ; and which, as it is 
altogether beyond the reach of the great bulk 
of mankind, so is the feeling of all others 
which to them is most incomprehensible. 
Nor was that noble enthusiasm without its 
reward. It was his extraordinary good for- 
tune to be called to form, at the same time, 
the Last Judgment on the wall of the Sistine 
Chapel, the glorious dome of St. Peter's, and 
the group of Notre Dame de Pitie, which now 
adorns the chapel of the Crucifix, under the 
roof of that august edifice. The " Holy Fami- 
ly" in the Palazzo Pitti at Florence, and the 
"Three Fates" in the same collection, give an 
idea of his powers in oil-painting: thus he 



carried to the highest perfection, at the same 
time, the rival arts of architecture, sculpture, 
fresco and oil painting.* He may truly be 
called the founder of Italian painting, as 
Homer was of the ancient epic, and Dante 
of the great style in modern poetry. None 
but a colossal mind could have done such 
things. Raphael took lessons from him in 
painting, and professed through life the most 
unbounded respect for his great preceptor. 
None have attempted to approach him in 
architecture ; the cupola of St. Peter's stands 
alone in the world. 

But notwithstanding all this, Michael An- 
gelo had some defects. He created the great 
style in painting, a style which has made mo- 
dern Italy as immortal as the arms of the le- 
gions did the ancient. But the very grandeur 
of his conceptions, the vigour of his drawing, 
his incomparable command of bone and mus- 
cle, his lofty expression and impassioned mind, 
made him neglect, and perhaps despise, the 
lesser details of his art. Ardent in the pursuit 
of expression, he often overlooked execution. 
When he painted the Last Judgment or the 
Fall of the Titans in fresco, on the ceiljng and 
walls of the Sistine Chapel, he was incom- 
parable; but that gigantic style was unsuita- 
ble for lesser pictures or rooms of ordinary 
proportions. By the study of his masterpieces, 
subsequent painters have often been led astray; 
they have aimed at force of expression to the 
neglect of delicacy in execution. This defect 
is, in an especial manner, conspicuous in Sir 
Joshua Reynolds, who worshipped Michael 
Angelo with the most devoted fervour ; and 
through him it has descended to Lawrence, 
and nearly the whole modern school of Eng- 
land. When we see Sir Joshua's noble glass 
window in Magdalen College, Oxford, we be- 
hold the work of a worthy pupil of Michael 
Angelo; we see the great style of painting in 
its proper place, and applied to its appropriate 
object. But when we compare his portraits, 
or imaginary pieces, in oil, with those of Ti- 
tian, Velasquez, or Vandyke, the inferiority is 
manifest. It is not in the design but the 
finishing ; not in the conception but the exe- 
cution. The colours are frequently raw and 
harsh ; the details or distant parts of the piece 
ill-finished or neglected. The bold neglect of 
Michael Angelo is very apparent. Raphael, 
with less original genius than his immortal 
master, had more taste and much greater deli- 
cacy of pencil ; his conceptions, less extensive 
and varied, are more perfect; his finishing is 
always exquisite. Unity of emotion was his 
great object in design ; equal delicacy of 
finishing in execution. Thence he has at- 
tained by universal consent the highest place 
in painting. 

"Nothing," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is 
denied to well-directed labour; nothing is to 
be attained without it." "Excellence in any 



* The finest desisn ever conceived by Michael Angelo 
was a cartoon representing warriors bathing, and some 
bucklin"on their armour at the sound ol the trumpet, 
which summoned them lo their standards in the war 
between Pisa and Florence. It perished, however, in 
the troubles of the latter city ; but an engraved copy 
remains of part, which justifies the eulogiums bestowed 
upon it. 

2k2 



390 



ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 



department," says Johnson, "can now be at- 
tained only by the labour of a lifetime ; it is 
not to be purchased at a lesser price." These 
words should ever be present to the minds of 
all who aspire to rival the great of former days ; 
who feel in their bosoms a spark of the spirit 
which led Homer, Dante, and Michael Angelo 
to immortality. In a luxurious age, comfort or 
station is deemed the chief good of life ; in a 
commercial community, money becomes the 
universal object of ambition. Thence our ac- 
knowledged deficiency in the fine arts ; thence 
our growing weakness in the higher branches 
of literature. Talent looks for its reward too 
soon. Genius seeks an immediate recom- 
pense : long protracted exertions are never 
attempted : great things are not done, because 
great efforts are not made. 

None will work now without the prospect 
of an immediate return. Very possibly it is 
so ; but then let us not hope or wish for immor- 
tality. " Present time and future," says Sir 
Joshua Reynolds, "are rivals; he who solicits 
the one, must expect to be discountenanced by 
the other." It is not that we want genius ; 
what we want is the great and heroic spirit 
which will devote itself, by strenuous efforts, 
to great things, without seeking any reward 
but their accomplishment. 



Nor let it be said that great subjects for the 
painter's pencil, the poet's muse, are not to be 
found — that they are exhausted by former ef- 
forts, and nothing remains to us but imitation. 
Nature is inexhaustible ; the events of men are 
unceasing, their variety is endless. Philoso- 
phers were mourning the monotony of time, 
historians were deploring the sameness of 
events, in the years preceding the French Re- 
volution — on the eve of the Reign of Terror, 
the flames of Moscow, the retreat from Russia. 
What was the strife around Troy to the battle 
of Leipsic 1 — the contests of Florence and Pisa 
to the revolutionary war ] What ancient naval 
victory to that of Trafalgar? Rely upon it, 
subjects for genius are not wanting ; genius 
itself, steadily and perseveringly directed, is 
the thing required. But genius and energy 
alone are not sufficient; couiiage and disin- 
terestedness are needed more than all. Cou- 
rage to withstand the assaults of envy, to 
despise the ridicule of mediocrity — disinterest- 
edness to trample under foot the seductions of 
ease, and disregard the attractions of opulence. 
An heroic mind is more wanted in the library 
or the studio, than in the field. It is wealth 
and cowardice which extinguish the light of 
genius, and dig the grave of literature as of 
nations. 



THE END. 



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" It is impossible to cast even a careless glance over the 
literature of the last thirty years, without perceiving the 
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ists. Criticism in the old days of Monthly Reviews and Gen- 
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' Whispered with white lips, the foe ! it comes ! it comes !* 

" In the early and palmy days of the Review, when re- 
viewers were wits and writers were hacks, the shore of the 
great ocean of books was 'heaped with the damned like 
pebbles.' Like an 'eagle in a dovecote,' it fluttered the 
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critics. They were not contented with the humble task of 
chronicling the appearance of books, and meekly condens- 
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but when they deigned to read and analyze the work they 
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own wit and knowledge than to flatter the vanity of the 
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writer, whose work afforded the name of the subject, was 
summarily disposed of in a quiet sneer, a terse sarcasm, or 
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The North American Review remarks : 

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essaystinddisquisitions with which British Periodical litera- 
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States." 

CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS 
WRITINGS of THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 
in one volume, with a finely engraved Portrait, from 
an original picture by Henry Inman. Price §2.00. 

CONTENTS. 



Milton, 

Machiavelli, 

Dryden, 

History, 

Hallam's Constitutional His- 
tory, 

Southey's Colloquies on So- 
ciety, 

Moore's Life of Byron, 

Southey's Bunyan's Pil- 
grim's Progress, 



Mackintosh's History of tns 
Revolution of England, 

Sir John Malcolm's Life oj 
Lord Clive, 

Life and Writings of Sir W 
Temple, 

Church and State, 

Ranke'sIIistory of the Popes, 

Cowley and Milton, 

Mitford's History of Greece, 

The Athenian Orators, 



Croker's Boswell's Life of Comic Dramatists of the Re- 
Johnson, storation, 

Lord Nugent's Memoirs of Lord Holland, 

Hampden, Warren Hastings, 

Nares's Memoirs of Lord Frederic the Great, 

Burghley, Lays of Ancient Rome, 

Dumont's Recollections of Madame D'Arblay, 

Mirabeau, Addison, 

Lord Mahon's War of The Barere's Memoirs, 

Succession, Montgomery's Poems, 

Walpole's Letters to Sir II. Civil Disabilities of the Jews, 

Mann, Mill on Government, 

Thackaray's History of Earl Bentham's Defence of Mill, 

Chatham, Utilitarian Theory of Go- 
Earl Chatham, 2d part. vernment. 
Lord Bacon, 



A remittance of TWELVE DOLLARS will pay for the ESSAYS of MACAULAY, ALISON, 
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MACKINTOSH, in 8 vols., bound in cloth, gilt. 



CAREY & HART'S NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



There probably never was a series of articles communi- 
cated to a periodical, which can challenge comparison with 
those of Macaulay, for artistic merit. They are character- 
ized by many of the qualities of heart and mind which 
etamp the productions of an Edinburgh reviewer; but in 
the combination of various excellences they far excel the 
finest efforts of the class. As nimble and as concise in wit 
as Sydney Smith ; an eye quick to seize all those delicate 
refinements of language and happy turns of expression, 
which charm us in Jeffrey ; displaying much of the impe- 
rious scorn, passionate strength and swelling diction of 
Brougham; as brilliant and as acute in critical dissection 
as Hazlitt, without the unsoundness of mind which disfi- 
gures the finest compositions of that remarkable man ; at 
times evincing a critical judgment which would not dis- 
grace the stern gravity of Hallam, and a range of thought 
and knowledge which remind us of Mackintosh,— Macaulay 
seems to be the abstract and epitome of the whole journal, 
—seems the utmost that an Edinburgh reviewer " can 
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or ignorant. His spice is of so keen a flavour that it tickles 
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Statistics, history, biography, political economy, all suffer 
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utterly insensible to the witchery of Macaulay's diction, 
must be either a Yahoo or a beatified intelligence. 

CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS 
WRITINGS of ARCHIBALD ALISON, Author of 
"The History of Europe," in one volume, 8vo, with a 
Portrait. Price $1.25. 



CONTENTS. 



Chateaubriand, 

Napoleon, 

Bossuet, 

Poland, 

Madame de S.aSl, 

National Monuments, 

Marshal Ney, 

Robert Bruce, 

Paris in 1814, 

The Louvre in 1814, 

Tyrol, 

France in 1833, 

Italy, 

Scott, Campbell and Byron, 

Schools of Design, 

Lamartine, 

The Copyright Question, 

Michelet's France, 

Arnold's Rome, 

RECREATIONS OF CHRISTOPHER 
NORTH, (John Wilson.) in one volume, 8vo, with a 
Portrait. Price One Dollar. 



Military Treason and Civic 
Soldiers, 

Mirabeau, 

Bulwer's Athens, 

The Reign of Terror, 

The French Revolution of 
1830, 

The Fall of Turkey, 

The Spanish Revolution of 
1820, 

Karamsin's Russia, 

Effects of the French Revo- 
lution of 1830, 

Desertion of Portugal, 

Wellington, 

Carlist Struggle in Spain, 

The Afghanistan Expedition, 

The Future, &.c. &c. 



CONTENTS. 



Mid -day, 

Sacred Poetry, 

Christopher in his Aviary, 

Dr. Kitchiner, 

Soliloquy on the Seasons, 

A Few Words on Thomson, 

The Snowball Bicker of 

Piedmont, 
Christmas Dreams, 
Our Winter Quarters, 
Stroll to Grassmere, 
L'Envoy. 



Christopher in his Sporting 

Jacket, 
A Tale of Expiation, 
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Cottages, 

An Hour'sTalkaboutPoeiry, 
Inch Cruin, 
A Day at Windermere, 
The Moors, 

Highland Snow-feiorm, 
The Holy Child, 
Our Parish, 

"And not less for that wonderful series of articles by 
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amazing and as truly glorious as the romances of Scott or the 
poetry of Wordsworth. Far and wide and much as these 
papers have been admired, wherever the English language 
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" A blaze of dazzling light which literally blinds us, while 
the tumult that its perusal causes within us, makes us per- 
fectly helpless."— Cambridge Chronicle. 



THE WORKS OF THE REV. SYDNEY 

SMITH, in one volume, with a Portrait. Price Om 
Dollar. 



CONTENTS. 



Dr. Pair, 

Dr. Rennel, 

John Bowles, 

Dr. Langford, 

Archdeacon Nares, 

Matthew Lewis, 

Australia, 

Fievee's Letters on England, 

Edgeworth on Bulls, 

Trimmer and Lancaster, 

Parnell and Ireland, 

Methodism, 

Indian Missions, 

Catholics, 

Methodism, 

Hannah More, 

Professional Education, 

Female Education, 

Public Schools, 

Toleration, 

Charles Fox, 

Mad Quakers, 

America, 

Game Laws, 

Botany Bay, 

Chimney Sweepers, 

America, 

Ireland, 

Spring Guns, 



Speech at Taunton in 1831 on 
the Reform Bill not being 
passed, 

Prisons, 

Prisons, 

Botany Bay, 

Game Laws, 

Cruel Treatment of untried 
Prisoners, 

Ameriea, 

Bentham on Fallacies, 

Waterton, 

Man Traps and Spring Guns, 

Hamilton's Method of teach- 
ing Languages, 

Counsel for Prisoners, 

Catholics, 

Neckar's Last Views, 

Cancan, Tableau dea Etats 
Danois, 

Thoughts on the Residence 
of the Clergy, 

Travels from Palestine, 

Letter on the Curates' Salary 
Bill, 

Proceedings of the Society 
for the Suppression of 
Vice, 

Characters of Fox, 



Observations on the Histori- Speech respecting the Re- 
cal Work of the Right form Bill, 
Honourable Charles James The Ballot, 



Fox, 

Disturbances of Madras, 

Bishop of Lincoln's Charge, 

Madame d'Epinay, 

Poor Laws, 

Public Characters of 1801-2, 

Anastasius, 

Scarlett's Poor Bill, 

Memoirs of Captain Rock, 

Granby, 

Island of Ceylon, 

Delphine, 

Mission to Ashantee, 

Witman's Travels, 

Speech on Catholic Claims, 

Speech at the Taunton Re- 
form Meeting, 

Speech atTaunton at a Meet- 
ing to celebrate the Acces- 
sion of King William IV., 

Persecuting Bishops, 



First Letter to Archdeacon 
Singleton, 

Second Letter to Archdeacon 
Singleton, 

Third Letter to Archdeacon 
Singleton, 

Letter on the Character of 
Sir James Mackintosh, 

Letter to Lord John Russell, 

Sermon on the Duties of the 
Queen, 

The Lawyer that tempted 
Christ : a Sermon, 

The Judge that smites con- 
trary to the Law : a Ser- 
mon, 

A letter to the Electors upon 
the Catholic Question, 

A Sermon on the Rules of 
Christian Charity, 

Peter Plymley's Lettcis. 



CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS 

ESSAYS OF THOMAS CARLYLE.in one 8vo vol., with 
Portrait. Price $1.75. 

CONTENTS. 

Jean Paul Friedrich Richter— State of German Litera- 
ture—Werner—Goethe's Helena— Goethe— Burns— Heyne 
German Playwrights — Voltaire— Novalis— Signs of the 
Times— Jean Paul Friedrich Richter again— On History- 
Schiller— The Nibellungen Lied— Early German Literature 
—Taylor's Historic Survey of German Poetry- -Character- 
istics — Johnson — Death of Goethe — Goethe's Works- 
Diderot— On History again— Count Cagliostro— Corn Law 
Rhymes — The Diamond Necklace — Mirabeau —French 
Parliamentary History— Walter Scott, &.c. &c. 

CRITICAL WRITINGS OF FRANCIS 
JEFFREY, in one 8vo volume, with a Portrait. $2.00. 

"It is a book not to be read only, but studied. It is a 
vast repertorv, or rather a system or institute, embracing 
the whole circle of letters— if we except the exact sciences 
—and contains within itself, not in a desultory form, but 
in a well-digested scheme, more original conception, bold 
and fearless Speculation and just reasoning on all kinds and 
varieties of subjects, than are to be found in any English 
writer with whom we are acquainted within the present or 

the last generation His choice of words is unbounded, 

and his felicit y of expression, to the most impalpable shade 
ofdiscriminat ion, almost miraculous. Playful, lively.and full 
of illustration, no subject is so dull or so dry that he cannot 
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ly, however, oVmere style, and apart from the great variety 
of subjects embraced by his pen, the distinguishing feature 
of his writings, and that in which he excels his contempo- 
rary reviewers, is the deep vein of practical thought which 
runs throughout them all."— North British Revitw 



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